


Shadow World

by Teyke



Category: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Aliases, Conspiracies, Gen, Illuminati, Non-Consensual Body Modification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-11
Updated: 2018-07-11
Packaged: 2019-06-08 15:35:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15246438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teyke/pseuds/Teyke
Summary: After Prague's top agent murders the world's most famous woman on live TV, Miller finds himself drawn into ever deepening levels of conspiracy.





	Shadow World

**Author's Note:**

> Ignores original!Eliza's canonical fate in MD, since I didn't find out about it until after I had this plotted out. (Oops.)

"Boss, you need to see this!"

There were a lot of things that Chang thought Miller should see, only ten percent of which was ever worth his time, which was why Miller never dropped by Chang's office voluntarily. Miller stifled a groan and stopped, letting TF29's resident conspiracy theorist catch up to him. It was past eleven. If this was one of Chang's paranoid delusions, and he missed vid-time again with his kids—

_"—just in from Picus HQ, we have lost all contact with—Jesus!"_

The talking head on Chang's tablet wasn't Eliza for once, but instead one of the reporters that usually broadcast from out in the field.

"Tarvos' networks started going wild ten minutes ago," said Chang. "The Picus HQ in Montreal—"

_"We have just gotten—viewer discretion is advised, this is extremely graphic—"_

"Bit out of our jurisdiction, Chang." Montreal. Despite his protest, something about that was ringing a bell.

"Yes, but I pinged—"

The screen switched to show footage from a ceiling security camera. It was poor resolution, but Adam Jensen was unmistakable as he prowled forward, nanoblades unsheathed. Equally recognizable was Eliza Cassan, as she cowered away from him. A body lay off to the side in a puddle of blood. Another sprawled among overturned computer equipment. The scene lurched forward in slow motion, and Miller could only watch as his top agent grabbed the most recognizable woman in the modern world and stabbed her through the chest.

  


  


  


Miller had always thought of himself as a distance man. Sighting the enemy in his scope from two miles away was infinitely more comfortable than trying to get up close and dirty. In management he tried to be hands-off as well. He had no use for fuck-ups and anybody competent should be able to do their jobs without him holding their hand.

It was one of the reasons he liked Jensen so much. Man never needed his hand held, quite the opposite. He was a beauty to watch through the scope, all oiled efficiency in motion, barely needing oversight.

Until this colossal fuck-up. Miller had wasted half an hour trying to manage the fall-out from an ocean away, and it'd been like trying to use ten-foot chopsticks to eat dinner—which he'd missed. Along with vid-time with his kids. He'd have had time on the jet, but by then they'd be in school. Who knew if he'd have time later. It'd been three hours since the attack and he was still plowing through the paperwork required before he could in good conscience abandon MacReady to the responsibilities of Acting Branch Director.

 _You had to get caught on fucking camera, Jensen,_ he thought. Of course the man couldn't fuck up somewhere quiet and inconspicuous, it had to be Picus' own fucking HQ. Miller'd tasked Chang with examining every millisecond of the footage, but at first glance what had been released so far looked real.

"You don't have to go yourself," said MacReady. He was in Miller's office, helping with the paperwork and looking enormously pissed off about the mountain of it that was coming his way.

"And leave it to the Americans?" Miller asked. North America got all the fuck-ups. More than that, from what he could tell, half their agents were working for somebody else. He had his suspicions about the rest of the Taskforce, but the Yanks had elevated double-dealing to a bloody artform.

"Bravo's not bad. They can handle Jensen."

Like hell.

He preferred hands-off approaches. But some things needed to be seen to up-close and personal.

 

 

Time he could have spent sleeping on the jet was instead spent on more paperwork. They'd just passed north of Ireland when he got the notification that Jensen had been taken into custody by TF29. Had, in fact, been there for hours.

 _Why the fuck wasn't I informed?_ he wondered, and phoned the Branch Director, Judie Menche, directly, to ask her that in more or less those words.

 _"Because this is our turf and your aug was found in the middle of two dozen dead civilians, covered in their blood,"_ Menche barked back at him. _"You're flying out as an observer, Miller. You're not entitled to all the details and I have enough to worry about."_

"I'm entitled to speak to my own damn agent when he's in lockup. If you ship him off before I get there I will roast your balls by the fire."

_"Like anybody wants the fucker. Pull the firecracker out of your ass. He's not going anywhere yet."_

She hung up on him and he lowered the phone slowly, thinking.

Jensen was a good man. Menche was not a particularly good woman. But she was a blunt instrument, and for all that the Taskforce lived in the shadows, he was inclined to believe her about body counts. So the footage wasn't faked, even if it obviously wasn't complete. Jensen had taken personal time and had used it to—what, murder two dozen people?

Fucking hell.

He abandoned his earlier paperwork in favour of pouring over Jensen's file and recent missions, his reports and other agents', and every evaluation that Dr. Auzenne had written about him until Smiley interrupted with a fourth round of whining about being dragged onto a trans-continental jet with no notice at 2am in the morning. He was complaining about the futility of the trip, this time.

"They're going to treat me like an interfering outsider. Because, you know, that's what I will be!"

"We're all TF29, you're not an outsider." Miller frowned at the eval he was reading. That mission had happened months before Jensen had even transferred to Prague, why had Auzenne dragged it up again?

"Corporate-style team-building has never cut down on territorialism, Director."

"Play it up, then. Treat it as a field-trip, learning from their expertise. Be all wide-eyed about how they get things done in the New World. Play to their egos."

Smiley puffed up indignantly, his own ego insulted at the suggestion. Miller cut him off before he could go into a rant. "I need your analysis of that scene, Smiley, and you're damn right I need an outsider, because I can't trust these people. Somebody set Jensen up, and that scene's our best bet to prove it. If you can't, he's fucked."

Just like Miller's current peace of mind.

  


  


To his surprise, Menche got over her snit by the time they landed in St. John's, and then some. They landed to news that Menche had assigned a VTOL and pilot to ferry the European visitors around, and both were waiting for them at the airport. A flash of a badge got a handy airport official to give them a ride to the right—private—strip, where they found the pilot waiting for them outside her bird.

"Malikah Farah," she introduced herself.

Miller shook her hand: firm grip, flesh rather than metal. How times had changed. The last time he'd been on this side of the Atlantic, the local divisions had been staffed with more augmented personnel than not, but since Menche had taken the position of branch director of Bravo and Jarreau had been ousted from Alpha, that ratio had tipped drastically in the other direction. If Farah had any augments, they'd be in her file, but to the average eye she could pass as baseline human.

"Glad to have you," he said, releasing her hand.

She shook Smiley's next, giving him a bland smile in response to his appreciative one. Miller shot him a dark look that promised an upbraiding in the future.

Farah wiped her hands on her pants in a casual gesture that could not have been more dismissive if she'd planted her fist in Smiley's face, and proceeded to completely ignore him. "Air traffic's still restricted around the city center, but I've got a guy working on getting me a special pass. We should have it by the time we're over the border. Are you ready to leave now?"

"Five minutes ago," Miller said brusquely, and caught a hint of a smirk from Farah, gone as soon as he narrowed his eyes. "Fletcher here is going straight to Montreal. I'm off to New York."

"Not a hotel first?" Smiley yelped.

"You should have spent less time complaining and more time sleeping on the plane," Miller said ruthlessly.

The pilot took care of the details, and shortly thereafter they were in the air again. Miller took his own advice long enough to grab a cat-nap, and missed Smiley's departure entirely. He woke up only when Farah came on the intercom to warn that they were five minutes out from TF29's Eastern Seaboard HQ: Menche's home base, where they'd moved Jensen after capturing him.

He thanked her, rubbed grit from his eyes, and wished futilely for a gallon of hot coffee. The nap had left him feeling more fuzzy than refreshed.

Going in by VTOL instead of through the front business' front door at least meant that Miller didn't have to play around at espionage. Farah pointed him at the roof elevator and left him with her phone number and the promise to still be around when he next needed a lift. In the elevator, his Director's passcard worked just as well as it had in Prague, and shortly he was in the lower levels, where Menche met him herself.

The first place she took him was by the lunchroom, which was liberally stocked with coffee. Terrible coffee, but half a cup later and Miller was starting to feel human again, enough to notice that Menche was in a particularly good mood.

"You're looking happy," he said, and downed the rest of his mug, then refilled it.

"This case is wrapping up nice and quick, and the media hasn't twigged that Jensen was a Taskforce agent," she replied. "We come out looking like heroes. Come on, I'll show him to you. I know you didn't come out all this way just to enjoy our coffee."

"Has he said anything?"

"Nah. Very tight-lipped, that one. Doesn't matter, we have more than enough to hang him with."

He followed her as she led the way deeper into the complex. "I noticed there were no casualties on your team when you arrested him." Had Jensen been trying to surrender?

"Clanks aren't so tough," said Menche. "Prefer 'em to the regular terrorists. Just grab a big EMP, boom, and no need to worry about hitting real people, either."

"You set an EMP off right in the center of downtown? The city must be raising holy hell."

"Oh, they're trying. Tarvos did us a favour there with their shoddiness, for once. That security video Picus showed has gone a long way to convincing everyone that any damage to their computer systems was a small price to pay for stopping this guy."

Through another door and they stopped in an observation room, darkened to allow the one-way glass to work to full capacity. Not that it mattered to the occupant of the observed room. Under normal circumstances, Miller knew, Jensen's augments would let him see through the glass, reflectivity be damned. Since he was currently stuck in an EMP chair turned up to max, all those fancy augments were just dead weight. He was blind and paralysed. Miller wasn't even certain if Jensen could hear or talk, with all his augs disabled. They might have to turn the chair's settings down to be able to interrogate him.

"It's no secret you were forced to take him into your division," said Menche. "Politics, eh. This doesn't reflect on you, Miller." She sounded matter-of-fact, sincere, one branch director to another.

He wondered how much of his own file she'd read. If she knew about Susie. He decided she didn't: if she'd done her research, she'd have had more respect for Jensen, no matter what he'd done in the last twenty-four hours.

Then again, the maxed-out settings on that EMP chair were their own form of respect, the sort you applied to dangerous animals. Maybe that was the most her mindset allowed.

"You got a speaker in there?"

Menche nodded to a set of controls by the window. He took a moment to identify the buttons he needed, then clicked it on. When he spoke again, he could hear his voice echoing out on the other side, loud enough to make it back through the reinforced glass. "Agent Jensen! What the fuck do you think you were doing!"

Muscles on Jensen's face worked. He couldn't turn his head, of course. Even if every aug in his body hadn't been disabled, his head was strapped to the headrest, all the better to ensure the constant EMPs kept his cranial augs offline. "...That... Miller? That you?"

So he could hear, and speak. Good. But there was effort behind the words. EMP chairs were not designed to be pleasant to the augs sitting in them.

Better than dying in a hail of bullets, Miller supposed. "You're goddamn right it is. Explain yourself, now!"

"J... sir. Janus. Janus is in Picus, I have to—I have to kill Janus."

Miller's eyes narrowed, and he flicked the speaker off, eyeing Menche. "You got any idea what he's talking about?"

"Janus, someone in Picus?" Menche curled her lip, but seemed to give it thought. "A conspiracy theorist's wet dream." She stepped over and hit the intercom herself. "Who is Janus?"

"Two-faced," said Adam, unhelpfully. It was lacking the dose of heavy sarcasm that usually went along with Jensen in an unhelpful mood. Right now he just sounded breathless. He should have been easier to read, without his goddamned sunglasses, but his face was grey and pale and his eyes were staring at nothing, blind and unrevealing. "I have to kill Janus."

"Is he concussed or tranq'd?" He shouldn't be, not if they'd taken him down with an EMP. But given Menche's attitude... the Americans might not have considered 'down' as a stopping point.

"No tranqs, and no concussion. He's got a titanium skull." Mench crossed her arms and drummed her fingers in annoyance. "Half his brain's inorganic, the chair's probably affecting him."

It wasn't anywhere near that high a percentage. Jensen had a ridiculous number of augments, but the cranial ones were supposed to be integrated additions, not replacements. "You had a doctor check him out?"

She shot him a disgusted look for the implied disparagement of her competence. "Damn it. He's supposed to be on the next flight to the Pent House. I can't transfer him if he knows something about Janus, that place is a fucking black hole."

Menche definitely hadn't done her homework. Or maybe she just didn't have clearance, but for her rank, that would be strange indeed. He made a mental note to look into it, or have Chang look into it, and instead said, "That's across national lines. The attack was in Montreal."

"Oh, like Canada has anything to hold something like that." She waved at the glass in disgust, then pulled out her phone and dialed a number. "Xu, get down to the holding cell. Turns out our prisoner's not so close-mouthed after all, and he might know something about Janus." To Miller, she added, "Xu's our interrogation specialist. Best friend anybody ever had. Whatever Jensen knows, he'll get it out of him. And if Jensen's bullshitting, he'll find that out, too."

Miller slapped the speaker button again. "Jensen. Did somebody order you to find Janus?" Jensen wasn't in Cybercrimes, he'd never been tasked with hunting down that particular problem.

."..no, sir."

"Who did you identify as Janus?"

"It was...n't, I don't know."

"Why do you think Janus was in Picus?"

"She told—I don't know. It makes sense. Global—" He cut himself off.

"Who's she?"

Jensen was silent.

"He's lying," said Menche.

Miller grimaced, but couldn't disagree. Jensen wasn't even lying _well_ , handicapped by the EMP chair and the concussion that Menche claimed he didn't have. "Answer the fucking question, Agent."

"I had an informant. She had... a data-trail..."

"Do you realize how much fucking shit you are in? You murdered innocent people, Jensen. You walked up to them and fucking slaughtered them. On fucking international TV. There are a billion people baying for your head right now, and if you don't start giving some honest answers, they're going to get it, stuck on a pike in downtown Montreal."

Silence.

"It... seemed like a really good idea... at the time."

And that was the best they got out of him for the rest of the day: he wouldn't say another word.

  


  


Faced with an entirely insubordinate, uncooperative agent-turned-homicide-suspect, Miller decided that the interrogation was best left to an expert. He was graciously granted a temporary office on base, his for the time being, and settled in to do some more mindless paperwork. Chipping away at the endless backlog of things he had to sign off on—after-action reports, prior-to-action reports, quarterly reports, personnel reports, so many damn reports—let him at least feel productive while he allowed the questions to turn over in his head.

Jensen was a disrespectful, cocky bastard, right up until he thought you were worth something, but Miller rather thought they'd crossed that line between them some time ago. That night in London had changed things, and not just how Jensen occasionally didn't wear his sunglasses indoors when talking to Miller. Sometimes he actually told Miller what the hell he was doing when he went off the reservation. He still ignored official boundaries and overstretched his authority as an agent wildly, and Miller suspected he had about as much respect for Czech law, but he got results and he saved lives and most of the time he didn't give Miller a heart attack.

And very rarely, he would bring Jim a beer at the end of the night and they'd sit there and talk for a few minutes about nothing of consequence. But that wasn't the issue here.

The point was, Miller had thought that if something was going to go tits up, Jensen would give him a heads up. And he'd thought that if Jensen hadn't been able to do so, then he would have started giving answers once Miller had showed up in person to ask for them. Jensen wasn't an idiot, far from it. He knew exactly how close he could toe the line, and when he could merrily waltz over it with no one the wiser. He knew he wasn't helping himself at all here by being uncooperative.

So if he wasn't helping himself, then who? His source? Someone in Picus? Janus?

Or were things exactly what they seemed, exactly what Menche and her crew thought?

When the paperwork started blurring in front of his eyes he took a nap at his desk, which lasted a good hour longer than it should have before his phone woke him. He read through the reports that Menche had thoughtfully provided him access to: forensics from the scene and on the cameras, and a hell of a lot of reports about what was going on in the press. Miller ignored the latter, and frowned at the former. Apparently Tarvos had well and truly fucked with the security footage, and was blaming it on an intern who'd tried to reset from backups improperly. But forensics had matched blood scraped off of Jensen to various of the victims and there were a number of live witnesses who'd seen him in the building, with and without gore all over him.

Jensen usually went in and out of places like a ghost. His favourite weapon was a fucking tranq rifle. Miller had his suspicions about some of Jensen's extra-curricular activities—he'd asked some very careful questions after the bloody assassination of the head of the Dvali family and their subsequent, spectacular implosion, and Jensen had given him some equally careful answers—but even then, that had been one man, at the top of a ruthless crime family, in the right time and place to pull the entire thing down. This had been a bloodbath, as atypical of Jensen as it would have been of—of—

Of you? he asked himself mockingly. He was probably taking this too damn personally. But none of this was _right_.

And none of the Americans cared enough to look as closely as they should.

He sent an email off to Chang, ordering him to turn every computer, phone, tablet, and goddamn TV Jensen had touched inside out. Then he called Farah. It was about time to get an update from Smiley, and Miller wanted to see the scene in person.

 

 

Picus HQ was still off-limit to civilians, but the luxury of his own VTOL meant he could go in via roof instead of running the security gauntlet at the front door. Thankfully, at least one elevator was still in order, and he took it down to the lobby where Smiley was waiting for him.

Sixteen hours later meant that the bodies had been removed, but the bloodstains hadn't. They started in the lobby: splatters against the wall that had bits of gristle and grey matter mixed in, headshots to take out the first unsuspecting security guards. Then an arterial spray, lower, and then the floor became a bloody pool where somebody had lasted long enough to make a mess.

"We can match this all up to the security footage," said Smiley. "It was a goddamn massacre. I mean, I know he's augged to hell and back, but, Jesus." He shook his head, looking pale. Smiley was a professional, but it was different when it was somebody you knew.

"Give me a walkthrough," Miller told him.

Smiley pointed at the front entrance, distraction disappearing as he re-focused on his job. "He came in and immediately drew his gun, fired three shots, three guards. The last guard was out of his line of sight over there, she trips the alarm. He steps around the far pillar and fires twice at her center of mass. Second bullet is the lethal one. Reinforcements arrived twelve seconds later, four guys in tac gear. He activated a glass cloak, then got them with his knives." He indicated the pool of blood. "Those took him five-point-two seconds, from start to finish. He goes this way."

They followed Jensen's bloody footprints deeper into the building as Smiley continued. "By now the building is going into lockdown, but people are still in the hallways. He killed two more people on his way to the central broadcasting stage, here—this guy was moving toward Jensen with his head over his shoulder, likely didn't see him. The woman he was talking to saw and ran, Jensen got her with a thrown nanoblade, which, I didn't know he could throw those, but there's no prints near her so I think that footage was accurate. He broke through the wall here, took a shortcut through this room. There were two people hiding under that desk. He didn't attack either or try to move the desk."

"He'd have known they were there," said Miller.

Smiley nodded, then glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice, even though there was no one nearby. "Here's where it gets weird. He breaks this next wall and gets into the stage area. He kills the furthest woman with a pistol shot. That makes six, by the way, he's out and needs to reload. While he does that, one of the techs has a gun and tries to shoot him back, missing three times—according to the footage. But a bullet ended up here, and another here." He pointed. "This isn't a load-bearing wall behind him, it's soft, nothing to ricochet off. Both those bullets should have gone straight through, like the third bullet did, which I think really did miss."

When the reports had said the footage was corrupted, Miller had thought that meant parts of it would be missing. _Changing_ it was something else entirely: just to start, it meant that there was another party involved in this shit-show. "Why would anyone bother to alter the footage?"

"Look at how these were flattened." Smiley pulled up a picture on his phone of two squashed bullets. "They look exactly like the bullets that bounced off Marchenko—from the TITAN aug. Jensen's dermal armour aug wouldn't be able to do this and neither would his body armour, which he wasn't wearing anyway. Considering there wasn't an armoured vehicle around for these to bounce off of, I'd say Jensen has a TITAN that he's never mentioned."

 _Fuck,_ thought Miller. That should have been in his file. That it hadn't meant that Jensen had been hiding things long before his vacation to Canada. Unless he'd gotten it in _in_ Canada, but that just opened up a whole other can of questions. And Miller had known that Jensen had his secrets, but—a fucking TITAN. When had he got it? _How_ had he got it? Why had he concealed it? And why had somebody altered footage to not show it?

Trying to hide that would indicate that whoever had altered the footage was somebody on Jensen's side—who was trying to help him get away with killing two dozen people.

"That's the first inconsistency," said Smiley. "They get worse as it gets messier." He made a face. "Somebody thought it'd be easier to hide the situation in. Okay, here we go. He's killed the tech with the gun, using nanoblades instead of reloading. He kills more people here, here, and here. There's a small crowd fleeing for the exit. The footage shows him shooting them, pulling head- or lethal body-shots on all of them in rapid succession. Bullshit. This," he waved a hard at the splatters of gore decorating the wall and equipment by the door, "is not consistent with gunshots. This was some kind of explosive—what, exactly, I'll know more if I can get a look at the scene scan, assuming that wasn't doctored along with the footage.

"Another guy is killed here, and a woman here. Both with blades. Now we get to the really obvious part. The part of the video Picus put out for the public, that's all wrong. It shows two bodies, here and here, and overturned equipment, and then he kills Cassan, there. But the actual blood splatter is arcing toward this wall. That's from the guy who wound up in the pool of blood. There's no blood splatter from Cassan at all." He pulled up the video and played it back at quarter speed. "Look, he gets her right through the heart. There'd be a spray, and it should be facing this way." He gestured. "Instead there's just this smear, obscuring this section of floor. I asked and got told that it smeared when they were moving the bodies. But, look, that doesn't even cover the whole area that should be showing splatter! It's so obvious!"

"What happened to the bodies?"

"Family already claimed a couple, really fast, including Cassan's. Picus is being a shit about the rest."

If Cassan's death had been faked... then, what? Kidnapping?

"Now, here—the footage shows that armoured security showed up. Jensen takes them out, but something is missing because it doesn't show how all this equipment got toppled. I found the place where it's edited back in later on, it's really obvious. Then there's nearly two minutes where Jensen just wanders around." He pointed out the blood trail as they followed it through the halls, around and then back again. "The halls are empty, so no more bodies until here, when Security decides to take a final crack at him. Based on his footprints and the splatter I think the footage is accurate when it shows him using his Typhoon to take them down." The carpet beneath their feet was red.

"After killing them he stops wandering aimlessly and makes a directly beeline—through a couple walls—down to here." He led Miller through another series of walls that had been destroyed, to a long hall with a door at the end: not one installed in a frame. It had been ripped off its hinges and embedded halfway through the opposite wall. "End of the hall, he finds a stairwell and goes down. He winds up in the sub-basement where he kills several more people. On-camera, he finds the server room and tosses a grenade in, an EMP that kills the whole system, including all the on-site records."

"So... the footage, that's all from off-site?" Miller frowned. "That widens the amount of people who'd have access to it."

"Considerably. I'd like to get Chang on it, but I'll let you make that call. I'm not sure I buy the EMP grenade, but it's nearly impossible to be sure, because... you see."

They'd reached the sub-basement. The doors to the underground server rooms were pulled wide, and there were plenty of other techs within, Interpol personnel being watched carefully by Picus representatives in business suits. Mostly, the techs were sifting through rubble. Racks of servers were shredded, coolant was leaking everywhere. There was no smell of gunpowder, though, and the edges looked too precise, too clean. These had been _cut_ , not blown up.

"To do this much damage, he must have spent most of the time between entering and the Taskforce EMP-ing his ass down here, hacking it to bits," said Smiley.

"That makes no sense," said Miller, mostly to himself. None of it made sense.

"This kind of thing, this is what we saw in the Incident. Out of control, very violent, very pointless and stupid. Upstairs..." Smiley made an uncertain motion with his hand, either or. "I'd want to say that was too controlled."

"Not for Jensen. This is all—too sloppy. Far too sloppy."

"There, you have my full, professional agreement. For what it's worth in the Wild Wild West, here," Smiley said sourly.

Somebody was working with Jensen to cover things up. But Jensen didn't do this kind of thing—unless he'd snapped, like Menche and every other aug-hater out there thought. If he had... then there were still his accomplices to find: he hadn't hacked apart that footage himself. If he hadn't... Suppression and restraint chips weren't the only control chips under development. Something as sophisticated as Miller had heard discussed in back channels could cast all these events in a new light. The hack job, the violence, both could easily be a distraction to cover Cassan's kidnapping—but TITAN wouldn't be. Unless the TITAN was very, very new.

Or maybe Miller was just seeing what he wanted to see. A control chip would be such a nice, neat, convenient reason.

It certainly wasn't a reason that Menche's people were at all interested in investigating. The flight back gave him plenty of time for to look through the most recent entries to the casefile, which clearly showed that the locals weren't even interested in the discrepancies with the footage that Smiley had brought up. That was taking prejudice to the point of incompetence. Miller glowered at the reports, then sent an email off to Menche pointing out the possibility of kidnapping, and another email off to MacReady, asking him to track down Jensen's doctor in Prague and ask some questions. A third email went to Auzenne, asking her to evaluate the possibility against the latest sessions she'd had with Jensen, but he didn't expect to get much there—he needed hard evidence, not more supposition.

Farah dropped him off at the hotel, which was frankly luxurious by his own standards. Interpol paid better than the army, but he still had a moment of shock upon seeing the size of the bathtub and bar fridge. It also wasn't a level of expense he'd authorized, which meant a fun hour tracking it down through expenditures until he figured out that Menche had put it on the American tab.

She must really feel sorry for him.

"Fuck," he muttered to himself, and shut the laptop. He pulled out his phone. There wasn't much more he could do at the moment, he finally had time to call his kids...

...and a check of the world clock told him that instead of evening, it was well after midnight over there. He'd gotten thrown off by his own timezone change.

He sighed. It wasn't anything that hadn't happened before and it would doubtless happen again, but he hated himself every time he disappointed the kids. He set an alarm on his phone instead for 6:30am, which would be after dinner but well before the kids' bedtime. Briefly he considered setting it for their breakfast time instead, but Neil hated it when he did that on a school day: it almost always resulted in them being late to school. And him missing the previous night was his own damn fault.

The bed called invitingly, but when he lay down he found that he'd taken too many naps recently to take another so soon, despite his fatigue. Instead he flicked on the large-screen TV and found a channel showing a footie game—some junior league in South America, nobody he cared about, but the game wasn't bad and it provided a nice backdrop to let his mind wander.

When his phone rang, he picked it up to find it was an unknown number. He frowned and sat up. The only people who should have his number were either known directly to him or to the Taskforce database that would identify them as they called. He muted the game and hit answer. "Who's this?"

_"Director Miller! You're a hard man to get hold of. Listen, it's David Sarif. I need to talk to you about Adam."_

Sarif—that explained how he'd gotten Miller's number. The rules were different for the idle rich. Christ, if Sarif knew Jensen was Interpol—and why the hell had Jensen told him that?—then he could turn Menche's neat case into a media shitstorm. "I'm listening."

 _"Adam's spoken highly of you and your integrity. Given the trouble he's currently in, there's some things you need to know. That footage that Picus is so keen on splashing around, it's faked. Adam couldn't possibly have..."_ The line faded into silence.

Miller got up from the bed and moved to the window. "Sarif, you there?"

Most of Jensen's body was Sarif tech. Perhaps Sarif was just protesting the innocence of his former employee. Or perhaps Sarif knew about some physical limitation that could bust this whole thing wide-open.

"Sarif?" The line stayed silent, then went dead. "Shit." He hit redial, and let it ring—and ring—while he tapped out a message to Chang. He hit send, then hesitated, and dialed the number for Farah. Somebody needed to check on Sarif in person, and he couldn't trust Menche and her crew of aug-haters to do the job, not when the man in question was Hugh Darrow's protege and Adam Jensen's patron.

 _"Your connection got flooded,"_ Chang reported a minute later as Miller climbed the single flight of stairs to the landing pad on the roof. _"Basically they overloaded the frequency to shut it down. But I can't tell whether it was from his end or yours. It could be either. You should really just assume that any communications you make on your phone could be overheard by anyone."_

"You can't fix that?"

_"Not while you're on a different continent. While you're over there your phone is relying on the local office for security, you're part of their network. It's supposedly more secure than relying on satellite links, but in practice, uh, well, it depends on the local security team."_

And everybody knew that the American office was full of moles. Miller grit his teeth. "Can you tell me where he called from?"

_"Sure, that's easy. Texas, Houston... "_

"Send the exact coordinates to my pilot. Malikah Farah. Find out what's happening there. And get local police in." Houston was too far away by VTOL. Dealing with local police promised to be even more of a headache than dealing with local Interpol, but his options for a quick response were limited.

A roar announced the arrival of the VTOL. At least Farah was quick on the ball.

 

Halfway through the flight and he was in the middle of an argument with Menche about Smiley when Sarif's number popped up on his phone again. He hung up on Menche with the barest of courtesies and jabbed the accept for the second call. "Sarif, that you?"

_"Yeah, me and a very concerned SWAT team. Jesus, Miller, you had to call the police on me? It was just a dropped phonecall. They broke my front door!"_

"I'm sure you can afford to have it repaired. Under the circumstances, I was concerned for your immediate safety."

 _"Uh-huh. I'm fine, except for having to reassure the boys in black. It'd go sooner if you'd phone them back and tell them I'm not being held hostage by my phone company."_ There was a distinctly sarcastic edge beneath the words. It reminded Miller a bit of Jensen at his worst.

"I'm en route to your location now."

_"Great. Looking forward to it."_

Nevermind. Jensen wasn't such a whiner.

  


SWAT trucks were still in evidence below as Farah landed them on the roof, and an armoured officer waited on the pad who demanded to see Miller's ID before he'd let him down to the penthouse suite. The door was, indeed, gone, but there was already a crew at work installing a new one—four-inch steel. Sarif didn't take his personal security lightly.

The man himself was standing with his hands on his hips as he berated a police officer. His sleeves were rolled up, displaying his ostentatiously shiny augmented arms, and there was not the slightest hint of deference or fear in his manner. If Sarif was aware of how augmented individuals were treated by authority figures, it had clearly never affected him personally. Even Jensen, who'd gotten arrested twice for mouthing off to Prague police officers, always had a hint of wariness about him when confronting the police, and Jensen could apparently turn into an armoured tank.

Though as Menche had proved, that was a far cry from invulnerability.

"Director Miller," Sarif said, turning and encompassing him in his aura of annoyance. "Get these guys out of my hair, will you?"

Miller nodded to the officer, gave her a grimace of apology for having to deal with Sarif, and showed his ID again, getting her out of the way. "You had information for me about Jensen." He kept his voice low.

"Yeah. Look, that footage—it has to be fake." Sarif turned, pacing away toward the window. "Adam's not that kind of guy. Hell, he's gone up against murderers, assassins, terrorists, and he only ever kills as a last resort. If there was really a situation in the Picus building they'd have never known he was there."

Miller stepped up beside him, sparing a glance for the view below, and then another to where the glass met the wall, and raised an eyebrow. That was easily a foot of glass, no doubt bullet-proof. Sarif had himself a regular little fort, here. "There were a lot of people affected by the Incident who'd never harm anyone ordinarily."

"That's your working theory? Somebody hijacked his brain?" Sarif's voice was cool and flat. He was holding himself stiffly, tension that hadn't been present with the police officer now in evidence. But he couldn't possibly be wary of Miller—not when he'd been the one to call Miller up in the first place.

"Like you said. It's not characteristic of him. But I saw that scene and there were a lot of bodies."

"Shit." Sarif looked away, then back toward Miller, his gaze bright and direct and yet, still—there was that sense of _off_. "Look, I know how governments view augmented people since the Incident." He gave the word the full weight of his disgust. "It'll be hard for you to find an expert who'll admit to knowing much. I designed a lot of Adam's augs, I'm the best person you can get to look him over for anything that shouldn't be there. I'll call up some old employees, somebody to look at the software in detail, do other doublechecks. What do you say?"

Put like that, it was obvious. "I'll see about it. Call your people and get ready."

"Great." Sarif clapped him on the shoulder.

Miller nodded to him. "I need to check in with my pilot, and put a call in." He paused. "I'm glad it was just a dropped call."

Sarif scowled, then dismissed it with a roll of his eyes. "Let me know as soon as there's word. I'll get my people there."

Outside, on the roof, Miller called Chang. "Tell me you're still monitoring everything going in and out of Sarif's penthouse."

_"I—yeah, of course."_

"Good. He'll be making calls—I want to know exactly to whom, I want their full backgrounds, I want all their activity, if they have anyone who has ever come in contact with Jensen and exactly when. And keep this to yourself, for now."

_"He's a suspect?"_

"I think the chances of somebody chipping Jensen are high, and Sarif certainly had all the access needed." His mouth tightened. "And if it wasn't him, then I still want him and his people vetted inside and out before they go rummaging around trying to de-chip Jensen."

 

 

Menche took the idea of Sarif poking around in Jensen's augs exactly as well as Miller had thought she would, but seemed to award Miller points for wanting the Americans to do thorough checks. He didn't tell them about Chang. Nor did he hear anything back from Chang. By the time they were back on the east coast, doubts were beginning to gnaw at him again. Goddamn Jensen and his recalcitrance. He was used to people getting in their own way, but his own agent doing so was just... personally insulting, somehow.

He had Farah drop him off at the office instead of his hotel, and went down to the aug cell. A Taskforce base never really slept, but in the hours just before dawn, it was more subdued than it might have been otherwise. Xu had given up for the night hours ago; Menche had thoughtfully forwarded his initial report to Miller, and it sounded like Jensen was doing his best impression of a brick. He reviewed it again on his phone as he stood watching Jensen through the interrogation room's window.

"He's been quiet," said the agent standing by on watch. He looked desperately bored, so Miller believed him. "Nobody in or out since Xu."

"Did you remember to feed him?"

"Xu offered, but he said nothing."

 _Could_ Jensen even eat, with all his augs disabled? He'd had enough trouble talking earlier. Miller frowned. "Have you gotten an aug specialist in?"

"The chair's rated to take down even the most shielded augs," the agent said reassuringly.

"Is it rated to not kill him?"

A shrug. "Nothing went pop when we hooked him up." When Miller glared at him, he drew back, defensive. "It has a jack, it hooks up to keep artificial heart and lungs going. It takes care of the basics. There wasn't a lot of time for anything else. He'd have been coming around at any moment."

Jesus fuck. Miller turned to look again at Jensen. Even restrained like this he looked lethal—maybe even moreso like this, the thick steel bars pinioning his body, even his head, just emphasizing how goddamned scared they were of him breaking free. His face was a drawn mask, his eyes blank and staring, like a monster sleeping with its eyes open.

Miller went over the security door and gestured at the agent to let him in. After the slightest hesitation, it opened, and he stepped inside. There was another chair in here, for any potential interrogator, and a table, both bolted to the floor. From experience Miller avoided the chair and leaned against the table instead.

"You are making my life goddamned difficult, Jensen," he said quietly.

If he'd hoped that Jensen would respond more helpfully to him in person, rather than over a speaker, he was disappointed. Jensen didn't twitch. In fact... maybe he _was_ asleep. Miller stepped over, instinct keeping him to the side instead of right in front, even though there was no way Jensen could manage to suddenly activate his nanoblades. Louder, he asked, "Jensen? Are you even awake?"

Nothing. He'd have snapped his fingers in front of Jensen's face, but that'd be useless. Instead, he leaned nearer to Jensen's ear, and at a volume that could be called a bellow, tried, "Jensen, wake the fuck up!"

Nothing. He put a hand on Jensen's shoulder, closer to his neck than he would have on somebody not made of somebody's metal, close enough to find flesh, and squeezed, saying again, "Jensen!"

The flesh beneath his fingertips gave only slightly; more metal lay beneath. But it radiated heat, enough that crappy parental instincts had him reaching for Jensen's forehead with the back of his hand. Of course, Jensen's forehead was covered by the metal band keeping his head riveted to the chair. He laid his hand against Jensen's cheek instead, and swore. Adam's face was pale, without the flush of fever, but he was burning up all the same.

"Get a medic in here, whoever you've got for first aid, right now, and get a doctor here immediately! And for God's sake, call in an aug specialist!"

He leaned his ear down by Jensen's mouth. The man's breathing was slow and shallow, but was that a faint rattling? The constant hum of the EMP made it difficult to hear.

"Fuck," he muttered.

First aid was a kit brought by the agent on guard. It had one of those vitalsigns readers that you stuck in somebody's mouth to get pulse, oxygenation, blood sugar, and temperature all at once: of course, as soon as the agent tried sticking it between Jensen's teeth, it beeped once and then died, fried by the EMP. "Shit," said the agent.

Miller ignored him, uncoiling the oxygen tubing and attaching it to the tank. He could take a pulse himself, if not as accurately, and Jensen's was normal. Perfectly so. His artificial heart was under the chair's control. "You said the jack'd keep his heart and lungs going. Anything else?"

"I don't know."

"Then go find the fucking manual. Bring me some ice packs, first!"

When he had oxygen flowing to a mask on Jensen's face, he pulled out his phone—standing well away from the chair—and pulled up Jensen's file. He paged through the list of augmentations, but the specs were all beyond him. This might be a malfunctioning augment, or he might have been poisoned, or exposed to a biological contaminant—or it might be an aug that wasn't in his file anyway. If Jensen had a fucking TITAN, what else might he have?

Menche arrived, wearing the face of somebody who'd been catching a nap in her office. "What the fuck is going on, Miller?"

"He's not non-cooperative, he's fucking catatonic. Where the hell's the doctor?"

"On her way." Her voice was clipped. "But she's a doctor, not an engineer. She checked him over before, but he's more metal than human."

"You need a specialist."

"I know that." She looked grim. "God damnit. We're going to have to call somebody in from the Pent House."

He looked at her, sharply. "I've heard the reports out of that place. They're butchers."

"They're the most trustworthy specialists in North America, and they have to deal with restrained augs all the time."

"Sarif—"

"Is a suspect!"

"He might have useful suggestions. He practically designed the man." Miller pulled out his phone and dialled.

It rang through and was picked up fast enough that Sarif must not yet have gone to bed. _"Jim!"_

Miller let that one go. "Jensen's gone unresponsive, and he's running a fever high enough to broil eggs. Could a malfunction of his augmentations do that?"

_"A malfunction, no. Something like that would have to be critical damage or deliberate sabotage. Did you check his augs—are any putting out excessive heat?"_

An obvious question. He should have thought of that himself. Miller dropped his phone on the table and stepped forward, running his hands down Jensen's torso and then along his shoulders, then down his legs, like any standard pat-down. Nothing. "No. Unless it's one of the internal ones."

_"Have you hooked him up to diagnostics? I can remote in and do a systems check."_

"No go, he's in an EMP chair."

There was a pause. _"Wait, what? Still? Why?"_

"You do recall why he's in custody, yes?"

_"Yeah, but I thought you'd chip him—shit. What's the chair model number? Or series?"_

The agent on guard had returned, hands full of ice and a tablet with a file open. Miller pointed at the ice, pointed at Jensen, and took the tablet for himself. "ECK-938," he read off.

 _"And he's been in there since you arrested him?"_ There was incredulous anger in Sarif's voice. _"It's knocked out his Sentinel Health Implant. Christ, you need to get him out of there, or he's going to die."_

Simmering irritation bubbled up, because there had to be another way. Menche would never go for this. "He was healthy enough before he was put in."

 _"Of course he was! Jim, his natural immune system is shot. He's got about half a dozen natural bones left and they're the tiny ones in the ear. His spleen was ruptured beyond all saving. We axed ninety percent of his lymph nodes to make room for the Sentinel, and without it he's got as much resistance to infection as an SCID patient on chemo. You need to take him out of that chair_ now."

"Hold on," said Miller, and hit the mute button. He took a breath and turned to Menche. "Sarif says he's immunocompromised. The chair's knocked out his artificial immune system. If we don't take him out of the chair then he's dead."

Menche's grimaced. "Damnit. Xu thought he might not be lying about Janus. But we can't risk it."

"Fucking right we can. The Pent House people use chips." Which various prisoners, including Jensen, had gotten around with ease, but she hadn't done her homework and hopefully still didn't know that.

"When they get here, sure. If he's still alive by then."

"Do you have any idea how fast people with compromised immune systems can go downhill?" Miller gestured at Jensen. "He doesn't have time."

"And let a cyborg like him free? We turn off the chair, all his other augs come back online, and he's a walking murder machine!"

Walking—"Take his damn limbs off, then," said Miller. "He can hardly break out without arms or legs."

"We don't have a specialist who—" She paused and blinked, looking thoughtful. "Life or limb. We could just use a hacksaw."

Oh, Christ. Miller hit unmute and raised the phone back to his ear. "How do we take his arms and legs off?"

_"Take his—what the hell?"_

"If he's out of the chair then he's a flight risk and a security risk. There has to be some other restriction and we won't have a specialist to install a chip here for hours."

_"You can't be serious. Take him out of the chair now, he'll still be sick as a dog. I'll fly up there myself with a team and we'll be able to put in a suppression chip before he makes any real recovery."_

"Give me an estimate."

_"Two hours to get up there. Hours more before the Sentinel gets him back to normal. I guarantee it."_

Miller covered the phone and relayed this to Menche, who stared at him incredulously.

"You're not nuts enough to buy that, Miller. Can he even give you an accurate estimate on how long until he's up and swinging? He doesn't need to be the peak of health to be lethal. Hell, he just needs to be aware enough to set off his damn Typhoon!"

"I'd volunteer to—"

"To what, get riddled with shrapnel? He may have been your agent, but he's my responsibility now." She shook her head. "What the hell's the problem with just taking the limbs off? Aside from Typhoon still being an issue..." She turned away, pulling out her own phone and tapping at it rapidly.

He uncovered his phone. "Can you walk us through how to take the limbs off?"

_"Listen, Jim, this isn't some low-grade crap from Tai Yong we're talking about, I gave him the best of the best. They're designed to last for decades, not to be swapped out every couple months. They're not designed to swap out at all. You'd need a LIMB surgery suite, or a hell of an expert and tools that—"_

"Will a hacksaw work?"

_"...you're a real fucking piece of work, Jim."_

"Will he go into shock and die?" Miller snapped.

 _"If anyone could survive the shock it's him. But it's not that easy, your standard hacksaw'll break on those joins. Son of a bitch. This isn't_ necessary _. I've got a helicopter on the way right now, and—"_

"That'll take too long. He's dying here, Sarif. Give me some options."

 _"Don't try to put this on me. You're the guy killing him. Christ. You need something like a PowerSaw N400. It's higher grade steel that won't break, it'll get through as clean as possible without shredding the electrical nerves into a feedback loop that'll have him in screaming agony."_ The words were pointed and sharp, angry.

"I'll put you on video and you can direct us where to cut," said Miller, then muted it again as another person swept into the room: a Dr. Erin May, from her ID, who'd been recently woken up, from her hair. She was carrying a bigger bag than the first aid kit, thank god.

"Tell me whether or not he's dying," Miller said, trying not to let his voice go too brusque.

"We're all dying," said Dr. May. "I hear you fried an AcuDiag."

"EMP chair."

"Can we turn that off now?"

"Security, Dr. May," Menche said briskly.

"Uh-huh." The doctor pulled out a long thin tube from her kit and ripped the plastic top off, then pushed up the O2 mask so she could stick the old-fashioned mercury thermometer in Adam's mouth. "Somebody keep that from dropping out of his mouth. Hold his jaw up if you have to." While the agent on guard attended to that duty, May poked Jensen's neck for a blood sample, which she stuck into a much fancier-looking diagnostic tool. It threw up results a moment later, none of which told Miller anything meaningful when he tried to read them over her shoulder.

She frowned studying it, then took a second sample. A longer period of study, and she hit a button on the side of the machine. It made a beeping noise and went blank, then started rebooting.

"What's wrong?" asked Menche.

May eyed Jensen dubiously. "He should be dead." She pulled the thermometer out and her eyebrows climbed. "106. I assume you'd prefer him not to be dying."

"Yes," said Miller. "Is he?"

"He's missing a couple key elements of an immune system and he's got a raging systemic bacterial infection." She was digging into her bag, pulling out an IV line and small fluid-filled bags from a cooler. "I need a stand to sit this on—this is just a stop-gap, he needs an ICU right now. And then that'll just be a stop-gap. He's dying. He's showing some signs consistent with somebody who's received a massive dose of targeted radiation. Do you know if he's been irradiated in the last twenty-four hours?"

"No. Normally he has an aug that substitutes for his immune system."

"But now you have him in an EMP chair, and the chair's disabling it. That fits—if this wasn't sudden onset, we'd have had the funeral ages ago." She handed the bag to the agent on guard, adjusted the mask back over Jensen's face, and slipped a needle into the vein on his neck with quick, adept movements. "I'd advise turning that aug back on, but I have no idea how well those things work, so it might already be too late. For somebody normal I'd say he was already dead. Without an ICU the best I can do is try to get him coherent, but it won't be possible to maintain for long and it will kill him faster."

Miller took the IV bag from the guard, keeping it carefully at shoulder-height, and said, "Go find a hacksaw, high-grade, something as good or better than a PowerSaw N400. If that's alright with you?" He directed this at Menche, who was eyeing him even as she continued to tap out messages on her phone.

"Worth a shot," she agreed, but her sharp gaze lingered.

  


Menche refused to turn the chair off before they found a hacksaw. Miller argued with her: Adam wouldn't recover instantly, they'd be able to tell he was recovering in time to turn it back on—

"Not necessarily," said May. "The immune system is artificial in nature, so I have no idea if recovery will map to the normal signs."

They packed ice around Jensen's head, neck, and torso, but it didn't make a dent in the mercury that Miller could see. May got her IV line set up with saline, but hesitated on the drugs. "Do you know his biomass? It's not in his file."

Miller grimaced. "He's always gone to a private doctor, an aug specialist." He checked his phone and found, astonishingly, that Sarif hadn't hung up yet. "Sarif. The doc's trying to keep him alive—do you have his medical info? She needs to know drug dosages."

There was a pause, and then Sarif said, sounding distracted, _"Yeah, let me talk to her."_

He handed his phone over and felt his mouth twist as he saw Menche watching. "This isn't necessary. If the chair's off, we could stick a monitor on him to pick up brain-waves for when he starts to become conscious—"

"Would that even work with him?" Menche asked skeptically, repeating the suggestion for May when she looked up from her conversation with Sarif.

May in turn asked Sarif, then rolled her eyes and did what Miller had been avoiding, putting Sarif on speaker. He saw Menche's mouth compress into a thin line as Sarif's voice echoed out of the phone, and felt his own doing the same. Sarif's good-ol'-pal tone had shifted into angry condescension. _"No, he has a titanium skull, in which, I'll remind you, his brain is currently frying. Seriously, if you don't—"_

"What about just alternating it back on and off every fifteen minutes?" May asked.

_"No! Christ, fifteen minutes won't be enough for the Sentinel to do anything and those chairs are a hell of a kick in the gut. You'd be torturing him to death. If you're looking for an arbitrary amount of time for which it'd be safe to leave the Sentinel online, try at least two hours. We produce miracles, but not—"_

" _Any_ amount of on and off is out of the question," said Menche. "I'm not going to risk lives playing chicken with a man who could go through this base like a brushfire in the wrong wind. If he got loose and mobile, with his invisibility aug we'd have to fry the entire base with EMPs to take him down again, and God only knows how many people he'd kill. Absolutely not."

_"I can tell you how to disable the glass cloak."_

"And the Typhoon?"

 _"He has to be conscious to manage any of it,"_ said Sarif, which clearly translated to 'no'. _"If you insist on—"_

An agent burst into the room. "We found the saw. They're bringing it down the elevator now."

"About damn time!"

Even Menche brightened, the slightest amount of relief relaxing her features. "Good."

 _"You'll have to turn the chair off first, or it'll fry the saw, too,"_ Sarif said waspishly.

"Get him off speakerphone," Menche ordered May, then turned to the agent. "How big is it? How long to cut through something the size of a leg?"

"Pretty big, director." The agent frowned. "It needs a flat surface. The box said it could do six inches a minute."

May had injected the IV line with a syringe, and was now prepping a second one. "I can try and keep him out of it, but his immune system may interfere when it comes back online." She listened to the phone for a moment and then hit mute. "Sarif just said to triple the dosage, so assume it will. And I'd strongly advise against moving him while he has a needle in his neck—" Another moment of listening. "Or while keeping it in while the saw's on, unless we can somehow... I have no idea how to dampen those kinds of vibrations with what I've got on hand."

"He's on death's door, he's not going to leap up ready to murder as soon as you flick the switch," said Miller. "Come on, Menche, stop dragging your fucking feet before you kill him!"

Menche's mouth was a thin line as she turned to her agent. "Get a team with aug-grade restraints in here, pin him down. I need to make a lock-down announcement. You wait until my go-ahead before turning off that chair. Miller—coming with me?"

Her flat tone conveyed clearly that his other option was being thrown out.

They went into the viewing room: it had an intercom that Menche used to page the rest of the base, advising everyone to power down electronics, back up anything that wasn't already or store it in the EMP-proofed safes, and stand ready to close blast doors. She made other calls, too, ordering a team up with EMP grenades to stand guard.

Miller watched as the saw brought in on a dolly, through the viewing room and into the interrogation chamber. May had his phone. His hands itched, but this wasn't his show. The saw looked like a table-saw that had taken steroids, and took two agents to lift it down onto the ground, but it had a plug that fit into a standard wall-socket. A techy-type had come in with the agents, and was fussing about it, setting up. There seemed to be a lot of paraphernalia with it.

"You have a go," Menche said into the speaker. Beside her in the viewing room, one of her agents pressed a switch, and a faint high hum that Miller hadn't been aware of vanished, audible only now in its absence.

May took charge, her voice made the slightest bit machine-like due to coming over the speaker. Un-augmented, but inhuman. She gave orders for restraints to be released while she herself slapped a skin patch over the IV site and then slipped the needle out, dropping the line to hang from the improvised stand. Then she had to keep her hands on his head, which drooped on his neck as the band around his forehead snapped free.

Two agents in camo gear stepped forward and took Jensen by the arms, much less gently, and hauled him to the floor. "Get his clothes off," May ordered.

"Seriously?" Miller asked, disbelievingly.

"Better to amputate higher on the limb, according to the manufacturer. Less chance of unexpected feedback," came the reply, as Menche slapped the intercom to one-way and gave Miller a look of exasperation.

"We're on the clock."

"I know that," Miller ground out.

At least one of the agents had done a strip-search before, and worked quickly and professionally to get Jensen out of his coat and shirt, tossing them into an evidence bag. Taking clothes was pretty standard in murder cases, but of course before now they wouldn't have been able to, with Jensen stuck in the chair, and wouldn't have needed to, with all the other evidence they had against him. Miller watched the rise and fall of Jensen's chest, which, despite the absence of the chair, seemed more laboured now than it had before. His limbs occasionally twitched as they rebooted, making half the agents in the room—the ones tasked with standard guard—all twitch as well, guns tracking the imminent threat.

The purpose of the extra gear that had been brought on the dolly with the saw became evident, as the tech and another agent placed a curved metal bar over Jensen's bicep and used an electric drill to bolt it to the floor. Miller recognized it: those were the kind of restraint bolts used in cheap holding chambers, to keep violent augs pinned. He should have expected Menche to have a ready supply. Another piece went over his chest, just below the series of shiny black bolts that protruded from his skin.

"They're going to suffocate him."

"They know what they're doing. Try to at least pretend to believe that, Miller." Menche's voice was dry.

With the lethal arms on their way to being pinned down, the agent moved on to stripping Jensen of his trousers, whereupon it became apparent that Jensen either hadn't bothered with underwear that day, or just made a habit of going commando. And that, horrifyingly, it wouldn't make a difference. Miller felt himself stare for a moment, then controlled his reaction. The agent doing the stripping wasn't so disciplined, and stared at where Jensen's dick should have been with the repulsed fascination of somebody unable to look away from a livestreamed decapitation. Or emasculation, as it were. There was still a... bulge, there.

Maybe it's that he has a built-in cup, Miller thought, grasping at straws.

"For fucks' sake, be a professional," Menche snapped into the speaker.

Still internally wincing, Miller barely caught the way that half the agents in the room—the male half, no doubt—all jumped. Most looked disgusted. The agent doing the undressing visibly shook himself, and pulled Jensen's pants the rest of the way free, sticking them in the evidence bag with the rest of the clothing.

Miller's brain, casting about for absolutely anything else to focus on, observed that Adam's feet were really fucking weird-looking. Another agent kicked one of his ankles lightly and laughed, saying something the speakers didn't catch.

"Ramirez!"

Chastened, the agent stepped back, as the tech moved down and bolted both of Jensen's thighs into place. The guy was carefully looking anywhere but Jensen's groin as he fitted a last restraint over Jensen's hips.

Then they were positioning the saw, May directing with Miller's phone held out and showing Sarif's face, tiny on video. They got the bottom plate wedged under his shoulder, the bright gleaming blade parallel to the side of his face—still motionless, expressionless, dead eyes staring at nothing. May fussed over it half a minute longer before giving the nod. The blade began to spin with a low whine that quickly grew earsplitting, even through the viewing glass. Inside, the agents not wearing combat helmets clapped hands over their ears. One of those who was stepped forward to take over the saw controls as it reached a steady pitch.

Miller's stomach twisted. For a moment he thought he saw Adam's eyelids flutter. _Stop_ , he wanted to say, absurdly. _Stop!_

Nobody would even be able to hear him, now. Going back in that chair would kill Adam—this was necessary—this had been _Jim's own idea, for chrissake._

The blade bit in and the whine changed to the tortured shriek of metal on metal.

  


Six inches of steel a minute went both horrifyingly fast and awfully slow. Miller tried not to let his shoulders hunch up around his ears as he watched. Sparks kept flying from where metal met metal, but nothing caught on Jensen's hair or beard. At last the arm fell away and everybody relaxed as the bone-shuddering screech dropped down to a whine, then faded into silence as the agent controlling the saw hit the off switch.

"Huh," said Menche. She let out a breath. "That was loud." Into the speaker, she added, "Good job. Continue."

They already were. The second arm went the same way: position saw, power up, cut, power down. The restraining bolts holding the severed arms were removed and stacked on the dolly, along with the arms themselves. Miller stared at them, trying to quell the unsettled feeling in his gut. Most aug limbs were built-to-purpose and distinctly inhuman, but Jensen's Sarif-designed hands looked like hands. The first time he'd seen Jensen disassemble his own arm to check it like he would a gun, it had given him the wiggins. This was worse.

The legs took longer, both because they were larger and because May spent some time arguing into the phone over the positioning of the saw. They ended up cutting in at a shallow angle, avoiding Jensen's groin. One leg and then the other fell away.

Jensen's eyes were still half-open, unaware, but the twitching running through his frame was getting stronger. More systems were rebooting. Abruptly, the eye-shields snapped into place, and everyone jumped back a step.

Before Menche could voice the order, an agent lobbed an EMP grenade next to where Jensen lay. It sparked and Jensen shuddered, once, all over. The eye-shields snapped back. His eyes were still staring, out of it.

"Two hours, my fucking ass," Menche swore. "Get the damn Typhoon plugged, now!"

Her words didn't echo in the next room at all: the speaker had been fried. She leaned forward and pounded on the glass, then made a meaningful face and pointed emphatically at something on the dolly. Agents scrambled to do her bidding. The tech with the bolt-remover rebooted it and pried the two restricting bars off of Jensen's torso, while another agent flipped him over. Only one person was needed to accomplish the task, this time. Jensen was a torso and a head. Jesus. Miller almost missed the tech hurrying forward again, carrying the item Menche had been pointing to, which looked like—a glue gun?

"What is that?" he demanded.

Around them, screens were coming back to life: the systems with the most redundancies, and the simpler systems, recovering first. The speaker buzzed with white noise as it rebooted, and then Menche slapped it off again. "Solder gun," she explained. "Gideon looked it up, bright kid. Somebody came up with the idea years ago when aug manufacturers first started sticking weapons into people. EMPs are a hell of a lot easier and more reliable, but if we can't have one then he figured it's worth a shot. Jensen's medical file lists his Typhoon port locations."

The tech—Gideon, presumably—was leaned over Jensen, prying up ports with a flat-headed screwdriver. Those poking out of his skin were obvious, but there were more on what was left of his shoulders, invisible among the black until they were open. Gideon took the solder gun and squeezed the trigger with an experimental air, until liquid solder oozed from the tip and splashed on the concrete floor.

"That's... Christ, you're going to shoot him up with molten metal?"

Gideon stuck the tip of the gun into one of the ports and held the trigger down.

"It's just solder, and he's already metal. He'll be fine."

"Jesus fucking Christ, you—" He almost stepped toward her, almost raised his hands to try to do _something_ , but she looked at him directly, dead-on, and he checked himself, punching down down his fury and trying to remember how the game was played. "Are you fucking having me on? Even solder'll give third-degree burns, and—"

"It's going into metal, not flesh."

"Metal wired _into_ flesh, it'll still burn him—

"He has an artificial health system—"

"Which you just fried again—"

"It'll reboot. We _have_ to disable the Typhoon."

"You're going to kill him."

"If it's that or letting him kill any of my people, then yes, absolutely. Jesus, Miller, you know his file. He's survived worse. He's a beast."

Miller wanted to punch her in the face, break the glass, and yank the solder-gun out of the tech's hand. None of that was possible, and not just because the glass was reinforced. His hands shook with rage; he locked them behind his back.

"You could have just shot him in the head instead of torturing him to death."

"He's not your agent anymore, Miller." There was a twist of something like scorn in her voice, and it made it all the harder not to haul off and punch her. "He's an augmented terrorist, and I'll damn well treat him as such. If you don't have the balls to watch, you're welcome to take a walk."

He choked on anger and was unable to reply. Instead he made himself watch. When the agent had rolled Jensen over, they'd left him facing away, and now Miller couldn't see his face. Impossible to tell if he was still out of it, still dying, or if his fancy augmented immune system really had kicked in and he was going to live to feel all of this.

 

Most of the ports had been on Jensen's arms. The remaining ones didn't take long. Gideon turned to the window and gave the thumbs up when he was done. "Got them all, Director."

"Good work," said Menche. "Alright, he's as neutralized as we're going to manage. Doctor, it's your show. Enlist whoever you need to help. Rodriguez, Toellers, you're on guard duty with a box of EMP grenades. Everyone else can stand down."

May took brusque charge as most of the agents filed out or helped Gideon pack up the dolly. "I need him upright—back on the chair, for now. Somebody get a gurney down here, it'll be better." She gave out orders with the snap of command, and soon enough Jensen was strapped back into the de-activated chair, needle in neck, ice-packs draped over his head and body, while other equipment was brought in: basic medical equipment, a proper IV stand, and a tech to look over the diagnostic equipment she'd brought in with her, which had gotten hit by the EMP grenade and now wouldn't reboot.

"I'm going to give him some aggressive antibiotics, but they won't be enough unless his aug immune system is damn good. I can't say when he'll be coherent. Probably not for several hours. I need to get back in contact with Sarif and get more information about that aug so I'll know what else I can give him."

"We'll set it up," said Menche, while Miller instinctively went for his phone and then remembered that May had had it when the EMP went off. It was no doubt wiped and useless. The movement caught Menche's attention, and she turned to him with a raised eyebrow. "You can stay and stand vigil, if you like." The sarcasm was not subtle.

Miller growled low in his throat. If Jensen did come around, then he wanted to be here to—what? Reassure the man? Like that was going to happen. He hadn't been able to do a damn thing to prevent Menche shooting Jensen up with molten lead, who did he think he was kidding? He was in the wrong part of the world to be able to call the shots. He needed to get out of here, get himself back under control, and then figure out how to get some fucking control over everything else. He needed to pace. He needed some sleep. He needed a drink.

"Call me when Sarif arrives," he said, then remembered his phone again. Fuck. "I'll pick up a phone on my way out."

"Better you deal with him than me," said Menche, her sarcasm even sourer.

Miller conceded her the last word and walked out.

 

The IT department was a madhouse. He abandoned the idea of quickly getting set up on a new phone and had Farah paged, instead. Luxury to take a one-minute VTOL flight instead of a 20-minute taxi, but it was four fucking AM and he didn't have a fucking phone. She dropped him off at the hotel, promised to come back to pick him up at quarter to six, and left him to stumble into the elevator and then to his room. Luxury was also a palm-print reader instead of an old-fashioned cardswipe on the lock. He kicked off his shoes, slung his coat over the back of the chair, and sank down on the end of the bed.

The quick flight had robbed him of the anger that had filled him to brimming fifteen minutes ago. He'd always been quick to simmer down. But with it had gone the energy it provided, and now it felt like there was lead in his own bones, weighing him down.

Christ. What a cock-up he'd made of this. He'd misjudged Menche—pegged her as an aug-hater but not a rabid one, somebody who didn't do her homework and saw augs as less than human, not a greater threat. One who'd use EMPs instead of RPGs, and thought that Jensen was worth keeping alive to ship to prison—he'd thought Jensen would be secure enough in her custody.

He hadn't thought in advance about other ways to keep Jensen in custody, ways that wouldn't involve injecting molten lead into the man.

He needed to start thinking ahead, and if he couldn't think now, then he should at least sleep and try to restore his ability to think. Instead he sat there, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. What a colossal cock-up. Surely there was something else he could have said—tried—he could have kept his damn mouth shut, and let Jensen take his chances waiting two hours for Sarif to get there. If Jensen was guilty, he might not even get replacement aug limbs, and his life would surely be short inside the Pent House. If he was innocent, then Miller still had to prove it. God knew Menche wasn't going to bother to try. And she wouldn't trust Sarif's expert opinion of the matter. If Miller could find—somebody else—

—assuming the Sentinel did kick in, and Jensen wasn't dead in the next few hours anyway.

His thoughts ran in circles, and kept coming back to the sight of liquid metal dripping from the tip of the solder-gun, and how it must feel to have molten metal injected into flesh. If Jensen was innocent, he'd need not just limbs replaced but also core augs. Hell, he might need new ones, depending on how much damage the solder had done to what little remained of him. Getting that kind of surgery would be—expensive. TF29's medical plan wouldn't cover all or even most of it. And Jensen's odds of successfully suing for medical costs were abysmally low, if he was trying to cover augmentation costs. Miller hadn't been thinking of that. He'd thought, limbs, and spoken to Sarif, and made assumptions, but if Sarif wasn't willing to drop that much money on a former employee, then Jensen was fucked. The position of Branch Director paid well and Neil made twice as much again what he did, but they'd still had to mortgage the house for Susie's surgery.

Christ. Susie. She had metal bones—not full augmentations, but she'd never be able to go through a public airport without a stack of exemption forms three feet high, and what if someday they thought of her as a weapon, tried to yank out—

Panic rose along with the overwhelming knowledge that he would murder anyone he had to to prevent that from happening to Susie.

And experience told him it would be a quixotic charge: TF29 was government, you couldn't murder your government, a civil war hadn't brought down the Australian government, it was up to goddamn diplomacy and politics and getting a fucking army, and the world had lost its fucking mind. If they took Susie—

—it's not fucking happening, it wasn't happening right now and it wouldn't happen, he was picturing disaster without even—

He wanted to see Susie and Ethan more badly than he wanted to breathe. He'd missed his last vid-time with the kids. And the time before. He couldn't remember what the time difference was from the east coast of North America, what time it was over there, right now. He didn't have his phone, but Neil's number was one of those he knew by heart, and he went over to the room's phone and tried dialling. It chirruped sadly at him and redirected him to the front desk, and a moment later a bright-eyed receptionist, far too awake and chipper for the hour, asked, "Can I help you, sir?"

"Yeah—I need to make a long-distance call, to Australia—"

"Oh, certainly. One moment, I'll bring up the screen for you. Just type in the number and hit the call button."

He followed the instructions and the screen went to ringing. Miller hoped it wasn't 3AM there. Neil would kill him. But it couldn't be 3AM there, it was only just after 4AM here. Christ. He hoped they weren't in school.

It went to voicemail and he swore, then sighed, running a hand over his face, and waited for the beep. "Neil, it's Jim. I—I'm sorry for missing vid-time." Better start with an apology. "Something... came up at work." _Something always comes up at work,_ Neil would say, tired and disappointed. "I'd like to talk to the kids, when—as soon as I can, when you can, please, phone me back. Uh, this number. It's the hotel. I... lost my phone. I'll have a new one in a couple hours, I'll try again then, if it's not the middle of the night over there. Uh, sorry, if it is. Please phone me back. I'd just really like to see the kids." His voice broke twice during the last sentence, and he bit his tongue, trying to will himself to not sound like a complete wreck, or that he'd been drinking, not that he'd ever been stupid enough to call and ask to talk to the kids when he was drunk. "Work is... not great right now, and I'd like to see them." This was not working to make him sound less pathetic. "Please tell them I love them, and that I'm sorry for missing vid-time."

He hung up, watching the screen go dark, then realized he was an idiot and phoned down to the front desk, instructing that if a Neil Mayhew-Smith or an Ethan or a Susie phoned for him, they should be put through to his room. He didn't know his room number. It was a foggy blur in his memory.

I should get some sleep, he thought.

He sat with his head in his hands and thought about saws and molten lead and civil wars, instead.

  


  


When the phone rang he sat up out of an almost-doze, heart rising, but it was the front desk calling to let him know there was a VTOL on the roof for him. It was early, only five-thirty. Damn.

Farah was waiting for him at the helipad, and handed him a phone before preceeding him up the ramp into her VTOL. "Director Menche wanted you back early, sorry. And IT sent that along for you."

"Thanks."

He phoned Neil, left a message letting him know he had a phone again, and tried not to fall asleep in his chair in the short time before they landed again on the Taskforce's roof.

Sarif wasn't on base, despite now being in the same city, a feat that must have required a considerably faster flight than that manageable by VTOL. The conference Menche had called was regarding what to do about him, since he was retaliating for not being allowed to see Jensen by making himself an utter pain in the ass. When Miller asked, he was informed that Sarif's number had already been placed on an auto-block list.

"That's ridiculous," he told Menche.

"I told the asshole to back off until it was light out," she replied. "We need the time to think. Vostler, continue."

They'd claimed a conference room for the meeting, which had already started when Miller had gotten there: considering that Miller was just an observer here, and how he'd left matters, it was as much as he'd expected. Being given notice of this briefing at all was a courtesy. He tried not to let himself grind his teeth over it.

"Right," said Vostler, with a nervous glance between Menche and Miller. "Well, um, we've tried breaking his security a couple times, but whoever he's got on it is really good. We need either a backdoor or somebody on his end to slip up—use an unsecured device on his network, or send a call out without enacting all the proper security. Normally we'd apply social engineering to try and find an access, but the usual methods don't work so well on the clock."

"And unusual methods?"

For the barest moment, Vostler's eyes flicked toward Miller. "No luck. We tried earlier, probably just tipped him off."

Unconventional methods, huh, Miller thought. He'd just fucking _bet_.

"So basically you have nothing, but you'll keep trying."

"Yes, ma'am."

She waved him out of the room and called up a different display, a dozen headshots. "Miller, you missed earlier. These are who we think Sarif might have gone to about Jensen or any kind of advanced control chip. Any comments?"

He studied names and faces, although in truth he recognized few. He hadn't had time to ask Chang for results, yet—he should have done that on the flight over. In the end he shook his head. "If Sarif's security is so good, why aren't you coming at the problem through them?"

"As far as Vostler can tell, he hasn't contacted any of them. We know that's shit, though—the two at the top are ones he says he wants to bring in to examine Jensen."

That was what she got for having shit cyber-security, in Miller's opinion, but as much as he wanted to rub her nose in something she'd done wrong, reason had reasserted itself a while ago. He shook his head in indication that he had nothing further to say, and the briefing moved on to Sarif's legal and financial resources while he pulled out his phone and texted Chang.

With the American TF network as shoddy as it was, no doubt any mole could find out what he was texting, but Chang would know that. As paranoid as Chang was, Miller could count on him to be discreet about anything actually important.

_Get anything on Sarif?_

The reply came back almost immediately. _NO_

Then: _His network security is too tight. I took a look at the protocols and I recognize this work. It's his old cyber-security chief, Francis Pritchard. I knew he wasn't dead!!!_

There was a file attached, a standard TF background run: Francis Pritchard, age 38, born in Concord, New Hampshire. Usually went by 'Frank', for which Miller couldn't blame him. Had a surprisingly extensive file, the reason for which became apparent immediately: he'd been a black-hat hacker who'd gotten caught, only to be released on bail and cleared of all charges, the whole thing positioned as a misunderstanding, right before he'd gone to work for Sarif Industries. It smelled exactly like the usual shit that corporations spread around when they wanted to hire criminal talent.

The second reason for the lengthy file was his association with a Task Force agent, one Adam Jensen. The Taskforce liked to be aware of criminal connections to its operatives, and Jensen and Pritchard had worked together closely. Apparently, though, the two didn't get along well. By the time Jensen had transferred to Prague, it would have been irrelevant anyway: Pritchard had been confirmed dead a month before, a victim of the ever-increasing violence ripping Detroit apart.

A man who'd wrangled a ticket out of jail might also have been able to weasel his way out of the morgue. Or Chang might just be coming up with paranoid theories, as usual. Miller stifled a sigh and texted back, _Can you give me a breakdown analysis of the protocols? I need something with substance, no hunches._

The discussion around the table wound down: three of the scientists on the screen were suspected of having aug rights' sympathies but had been considered low-priority. None of those three were Sarif's picked examiners. "Move 'em up the list," said Menche. "If we can connect Sarif to 'em that'd be a hell of a coup."

"Yes, Director."

Menche sighed. "Alright. Time to beard the lion." She waved the remaining agents to the other side of the room, then tapped at a set of controls near the middle of the conference room table. A screen folded down out of the ceiling as ringing filled the room. One ring, two rings—and the screen filled with a giant image of David Sarif's face.

 _"Directors. Nice of you to call back,"_ he said, words salted lightly with sarcasm. From the angle of the camera he'd be able to see Miller and Menche, but not her agents.

"Your lawyers were very insistent," said Menche, which, what? Miller kept his face impassive and reviewed the prior minutes, trying to spot what he'd missed, and couldn't find anything. It must have been discussed before he'd gotten there. That, or he was more tired than he'd thought.

_"Yeah, I hear they have special classes on that at Yale. Come on, it's really very straightforward. The paperwork is clear. Those augmentations were loaned to Adam Jensen, but as soon as they're no longer in his custody, they're mine."_

"Under Article 12 of the HUMAN Act, we're allowed to confiscate augmentations as evidence when investigating acts of terrorism, and—"

_"Ah ah, but not augmentations developed and registered under a DoD contract. Those remain with the rights-holder."_

"Funny." Menche gave a teeth-baring smile. "I don't see Tai Yong asking for them back."

Sarif leaned back and laughed, but Miller had seen the brief flash of fury in his eyes. _"Tai Yong didn't gobble up_ everything _I ever made. The rights on those limbs remain with me. They were only ever leased to Sarif Industries. C'mon, Judie, your lawyers must already have told you all this. You know the forfeiture's both valid and immediate. Cut the crap—what do you want?"_

Menche cocked her head to one side. "I'll turn that question around on you. You didn't mention anything about this when you were telling us how to remove the limbs. Why so worried now?"

 _"I've been up front with you, Judie. You know what I want."_ Sarif's fake humour had vanished, and now he was leaning forward, intent. Sincere, to all appearances. _"Let my team take a look at Adam—including those limbs. I'd feel a lot better about them remaining on your property_ _after that_ _, and you'd get an expert_ _'s_ _assessment on whether Adam was compromised."_

Behind the screen, out of range of the pickups, one of the agents had been talking on the phone. Now she looked up and waved to get their attention, then gave Menche a thumbs up followed by an OK symbol.

Menche looked back at the screen. "You'll have the limbs immediately. What you want will take a little longer to arrange. Frankly, I'm not sure of the necessity." She shrugged. "We'll see."

 _"Consider it, Judie,"_ said Sarif, but he didn't have time for anything more before Menche hung up on him.

"Prick," she muttered.

"I'd use stronger words," said Miller. "But he has a point. He's the best choice to pick out anything strange going on with Jensen's augs."

"He can't be trusted. I had a talk with Manderly this morning—earlier this morning." She yawned. "Last night, at this rate. Sarif's under investigation and he needs to not be anywhere near any aug-related cases—that order's straight from the top."

Sarif had been under investigation a year ago, when he'd barely come out of a coma. He'd been cleared of all charges. That should have meant something, when it was a Taskforce investigation, even if it had been spearheaded by Americans. The Americans hadn't been so bad a year ago. Had something new come to light? He'd checked Sarif's file just yesterday. "That investigation's been re-opened?"

She shook her head. "New. Manderly didn't give me all the details, take it up with him. Bravo's running it, it's their jurisdiction. Juarez, what time'll that expert be arriving?"

"Not sure yet, Director, but probably sometime late afternoon. They're still filing a flight plan."

Miller cocked an eyebrow at her.

"Sarif isn't the only expert on augs around," she informed him. "Juarez, what exactly did they say about the limbs?"

"There's no way in hell it would matter," Juarez said, with the air of someone quoting verbatim.

"Fine. Pack 'em up and ship 'em to Sarif."

"Experts from the Pent House?" Miller asked, unable to entirely keep the acid out of his voice.

"They know the most about control chips. They use them all the time."

"Those are suppression and restraint chips."

"And where do you think the newer chips get tested, huh?" Menche sounded tolerantly amused.

Of course she did. She had all the goddamn power, here.

 

 

He spent the next six hours trying to win back some of that power, and failing utterly. Manderly ranted down the phone about Sarif, augmentations, and the Incident, and didn't let Miller get in a word edgewise. Smiley could tell him everything that Menche's people were doing wrong with the forensics, but didn't have any better leads on who had altered the footage. Eliza Cassan's closest living relatives had been re-interviewed by Menche's people: she'd been buried within twenty-four hours of the attack and the family was threatening to sue for religious discrimination over a request to exhume the body. In any case, the morgue records checked out.

If it wasn't a kidnapping, then what the hell was it?

Chang's work didn't pass the 'better than a hunch' test, and he also hadn't gotten anywhere with tracking down Jensen's aug doctor. Mai, the agent who'd been going to help Chang with the physical aspect of that, had instead uncovered a whole branch of the Dvali that had gone underground and into human trafficking. Miller kicked that one back to MacReady, then spent more hours on the phone dealing with the fallout of it anyway. When he finally got free it was around two, and he had one missed call from Neil—at 11:17. He'd been on the phone for three straight goddamn hours.

And it was three in the morning in Perth and too fucking late to call him back.

His head throbbed, his eyes felt gritty, and the coffee was fucking American. Miller called Farah for a pick-up.

His phone rang.

 _"Jim,"_ said Sarif. _"Glad you picked up. Hey, Adam says you're a coffee guy, and I've got some great stuff over here. Let's chat. I think this would go better if we weren't peering at each other through screens."_

He should obey Manderly's implied order—implied only, because the man had never gotten around to making it explicit—and keep away from Sarif, leave him to Bravo. Failing that, he should have left it to Menche's team. But Menche's team was incompetent, made lazy by their bigotry or their various divided loyalties or whatever else. They hadn't caught the hacker, they hadn't noticed the bigger problems with the footage, and they hadn't gotten past any of Sarif's firewalls.

Sarif was asking the wrong director for coffee if he wanted access to Jensen, though. Then again, Sarif doubtless knew that, and was trying anyway. He must be desperate.

Miller shoved aside the nagging feeling that he was starting to get desperate himself. That was just lack of sleep talking. "Whatever you've got has to be better than the swill we have over here," he said. "Where are you staying?"

  


 

His phone rang as he stepped out from the VTOL onto the roof of Sarif's hotel. Blocked number—not from home. Not that Neil or the kids would be phoning him in the middle of the night, of course. "Miller here."

 _"Hello, Director Miller. Do you have a moment to talk?"_ It was a woman. She sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn't quite place it. God, he hoped it wasn't another fucking lawyer.

"Who is this?"

_"Eliza Cassan. I really need to speak with you."_

Miller stopped in his tracks.

 _"We can make this a video call, if that would help reassure you who I am,"_ she added.

A quick glance showed no one around to overhear. The roof was deserted except for him and Farah, and Farah was in her VTOL. He hit video, and she came up onscreen, instantly recognizable: paler than usual, but her hair and clothes were the same posh styles she wore on camera. "I'm glad to see you alive, Ms. Cassan."

Could it be faked? Of course it could. But could it be faked in real-time? He hit the record button.

 _"Some people wouldn't be."_ Her voice was earnest and smooth. Exactly the way it was on TV. What part was she playing, here? _"Please don't tell anyone else I've contacted you. I barely escaped alive from Picus, and I know that somebody's interfering with the investigation, trying to cover things up."_

In Prague his first question would be to ask her what happened. But this was the US. "This connection might not be secure."

_"It is for a short while. I had to risk this—you're the only one who can and might help Adam."_

"Adam Jensen?"

_"He's a friend. And he didn't kill me, obviously. He's being set up to take the fall for everything and he can't defend himself."_

"Tell me what really happened, then."

_"It's a long story. We don't have time right now for all of it—"_

"Ms. Cassan—"

_"The most important part is, he was not in control. But it's not the kind of control chip that the governments in Europe have been considering. It's much more subtle than that and it's embedded in his entire system. He was here in Montreal looking for help with—"_

Between one word and the next, her image vanished and the call dropped.

"Ms. Cassan?" Miller shook the phone, futilely, and tried to hit redial, also futilely. The number had been blocked. He swore. For a moment he hesitated, tempted to dial Chang, but—no, Chang had told him that all communications from the North American network should be considered compromised.

Evidently he needed to pick up some burner phones. Fuck. Using a public, unsecured network would put him at the mercy of every data-miner in the city, but maybe it'd be enough to buy him a conversation a full five minutes long. He could only hope that Cassan had dropped the call herself, sensing trouble, than because somebody had tracked down her location.

Assuming it wasn't a trap. Assuming she wasn't lying for her own ends. He pulled up the recording to playback the call, and was only partly surprised to find that it was blank.

He ran his hands through his hair and set himself to remembering the phone call, picking it apart before any of it faded. She'd said they didn't have time _right now_ —hopefully she'd make contact again. Adam was a friend of hers... how the hell did Jensen become friends with the most famous woman in the world? Good enough friends to go to her—her? Or somebody else in Montreal?—when he needed help with... was it the control chip? Had Jensen known? Or had he been looking for help with something else?

Not exactly a control chip. Something that ran through all his systems... fuck. He needed an aug expert. Not just an expert, but somebody who'd designed systems, who could ferret out something system-wide and 'subtle'. If not Sarif and his team, then somebody equivalent, and where the hell was he going to find somebody like that except at the Pent House?

But if Jensen _had_ known, had been in Montreal for this... he dialled Chang's number.

_"Sorry, Director, I think I'm making progress but I haven't gotten through yet. Pritchard is really good."_

"Grab a couple more guys if you need to. Make sure they're local." He decided against adding an order to be sure they could be trusted; useless, redundant, and it would just send Chang into the deep-end of paranoia. "I'll call MacReady and update him."

 _"That would help,"_ Chang said, cautiously.

He sounded like he expected a caveat. Miller grinned mirthlessly, a baring of his teeth at the wall, and then was glad it was a voice-only call. That would _also_ send Chang off the deep-end.

"Jensen's aug doctor. Any updates on that?"

_"Um... no. I set up a basic search on his finances, but I've been focusing on Sarif. There's just not much to go on, computer-wise. If he's paying this doctor he's doing it in cash, but he hasn't been making large withdrawals."_

"Alright. Keep on Sarif for now, I'll get more help for you with the doctor than Mai."

He hung up and phoned MacReady, giving him the run-down on what they knew of Jensen's doctor in Prague (faked file, under-the-table, but had to exist because where else would Jensen get repairs done?) and the need to get some agents on tracking down whoever it was, _now_. He left out the why, which, predictably, MacReady called him on.

_"Do I get to know the reason this has moved up the priority list?"_

Miller grunted. "When the Americans have fixed their systems security so it's not the laughing-stock of the world, sure."

_"Right-o. On it, sir."_

Burner phones, Miller thought grimly. God, it really was a shit-show when a Branch Director needed burner phones to conduct business with his own fucking branch.

Right. He'd set those balls in motion. Time to stop keeping Sarif waiting.

 

The hotel that the Taskforce was putting Miller up in was plush, much better digs than he'd been expecting. He'd have called it luxurious, even. He revised his opinion of that as he stepped into Sarif's suite. There was luxury for the working man, and then there was luxury for billionaires, and the latter involved a lot more... everything. Space. High-tech computers. Threads-per-inch. Gold filigree.

"Jim," said Sarif, waving him through the living room and to a bar. "You got any preferences for your coffee? They threw thirty speciality blends at me when I mentioned it, be a shame to put them to waste. Or would you prefer something else?" He waved at the rack behind the bar, which held not just wine but a number of scotches. A number of very _expensive_ scotches.

"Coffee," said Miller, out of practicality and with more than a little regret. That looked like a bottle of Macallan. On the other hand, best to stay away from that one if he didn't want to open himself up to a charge of accepting a bribe. "Espresso, if you don't mind. I'm sure any of those thirty choices will be better than the sludge I've been drinking recently."

"You'll like this one." Sarif busied himself with the espresso machine behind the bar—easily a match for Miller's machine at his apartment in Prague, and the first time he'd tried to make anything with it it had taken him fifteen minutes to figure out where to put the coffee beans. Either Sarif was just smarter about coffee machines or this one was more user-friendly, because a minute later they both had espressos in front of them. Miller tried his and found it slightly sweeter than he liked, but it wasn't bad.

Sarif pulled up a seat on his side of the bar. He looked disgustingly chipper for a man who probably had gotten even less sleep than Miller in the past thirty-six hours, but then, he could doubtless afford some kind of custom-designed stimulant to keep him awake without side-effects. Or maybe he'd already had a few of these espressos.

"I was on the phone with Erin while you were lingering around on my roof," said Sarif.

Shots fired. Fuck. Miller hadn't done a good enough sweep for cameras, and hoped the resolution of whatever had been up there was poor. "Erin?" he asked, both to side-step and because he had no clue who that was.

"Erin May, your Taskforce doctor. Very competent woman, but she's not an augmentation specialist or even a surgeon. She's smart enough to get advice when she needs to, and Adam's pretty touch-and-go right now."

"The last update I had on Jensen was that he was stable."

"Ehh." Sarif raised his hand—gold and white and just as graceful, as human-looking, as Jensen's had been—and dipped it back and forth. "For now. The Sentinel's doing its job, but that infection was dug in and it's putting up a hell of a fight. You didn't help any by hitting him with an EMP _again_. And that goddamn solder job..." He shook his head in disgust. "Not to mention cutting off his damn arms and legs. Your people butchered him, Jim."

"You did that first."

"I was saving his life. You fucked over his system for no damn good reason."

"He killed twenty-six people. That's a reason."

Sarif set his coffee down with a clink. "You know Adam's not that guy."

"I'd like to think that," said Miller, slowly, and then, letting that sit there to draw Sarif out, added, "Did you know Adam was friends with Eliza Cassan?"

"Friends?" Sarif looked taken aback. "Really? Huh. No, I didn't know that."

"But you knew they knew each other."

"Sure. A couple years back Adam was in Montreal on company business, they ran into each other."

"You didn't mention that."

"Please." Sarif was dismissive. "You'd have given me that 'murders are most often committed by someone known to the victim' spiel and damned Adam even more thoroughly." He saw Miller's expression and smiled. "Adam told me about that little statistic. An employee was being stalked."

"Why'd you think Adam didn't kill Cassan?"

"He's not that kind of guy. The first time he was in the field after getting augmented, he—"

"Cut the bullshit, Sarif." Miller glared at him. "Not that kind of guy, like hell. You were Darrow's protege, once, and everybody knows how he turned out."

"Hugh was hurt, and misguided—"

"Somebody who killed millions isn't _misguided_ ," said Miller, disgusted.

Sarif was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he sounded regretful. Was it genuine? "We got through to him at the end. But it was too late. And then—" He gestured again with one of his sleek golden hands. "Panchaea was collapsing."

This was getting off-topic. "If one man could go that way, so could another. You know that. Why are you so convinced the footage of Adam killing Cassan is faked?"

Sarif eyed him, considering. Then he got up and pulled down a bottle of scotch—not the Macallan, but a decent vintage. He pulled out a tumbler, too, and raised an eyebrow at Miller, to which Miller shook his head. Sarif shrugged and poured himself a fingerwidth, neat, then sat back down.

"I thought you'd know, Jim. It's... not exactly an open secret, but it's not well-concealed, either. Eliza's a, what do you call it, agoraphobic. She never leaves her house, ever. She does everything through holoconconferencing software, and they do all the special effects and editing at Picus HQ, but she's never visited there in person."

"Where's her house?"

Sarif blinked, then shrugged. "I haven't a clue."

Something in there was a lie. Sarif was too damn hard to pin down. "Do you think she's dead?"

"I'd thought no, initially, but... hell. These people, they excel at making inconveniences vanish. Permanently."

"'These people'?"

"Oh, come on, Jim. You know the players. Taking apart Picus like that, getting the video out, getting Eliza, setting up Adam... I couldn't tell you names, but you know what they are."

"I need names if I'm to start arresting people."

"Going to drag them into the light?" Sarif barked a laugh, and for a moment, past the schmaltz and the glitter he looked tired. "It's been tried before. I'd settle for extracting Adam from your clutches before that bitch decides to saw off his head, too."

Miller thought that was the most honest that Sarif had been with him yet.

"You know anything about Juggernaut?"

"Picus' favourite bogeyman? Sure, what everybody else does. You don't really think they're involved, do you? They're hacktivists—fine, I can see what you think of that, let's call them cyberterrorists. Either way, kidnapping and mass murder, not really their thing, is it?"

"Would they be able to chip Jensen?"

"Technologically? Depends on the chip. They could get a suppression chip, sure, but you're talking about something more complicated... software wise, they're hackers that've run rings around plenty of heavy hitters, so, sure. But how the hell would they take him down long enough to stick the hardware in him?" Sarif shrugged. "Whoever did that would need either a lot of firepower or a chance to thoroughly abuse his trust." He eyed Miller meaningfully on that last one.

He eyed Sarif right back. "Yeah, I'd thought of that."

Sarif blinked. "What... _me?_ " He looked genuinely taken aback, and then genuinely angry. "Jesus, is that why you've been not letting me see—fuck, like hell! I treated Adam like my own goddamn son! Christ!"

"You cut off his perfectly good arm and both of his perfectly good legs—"

"They were not perfectly good! I made him better."

"Without his consent."

"He wasn't in a condition to indicate otherwise, and he _needed_ the upgrade." Sarif had reigned in his temper, now, and was watching Miller with narrowed eyes. "And anything else is between me and Adam. Christ. I've refused every offer that's come my way to provide design input to those goddamn puppet chips. They're sick, twisted, and they should be outlawed. So of course they're embraced by the small-minded masses, and even smaller-minded governments." His mouth twisted with disgust. "Fuck." He slammed his glass down on the bar and got up, going around to stand in front of the window, facing away from Miller.

Just like he had in Houston. Always hiding something.

Why had Miller expected otherwise? Sarif was under investigation by the Taskforce already. Did he know that? The Taskforce had probably attempted to hack him yesterday—he doubtless knew _that_. That he was still talking to Miller at all... meant that he wanted this a lot.

"Fine. I can see I'm not going to convince you to let me check Adam out with my people. But for the love of God, hire an outside contractor to do it. I can give you a names. Somebody from the corporate world, not government."

"You don't trust the American government?" A laughable question, but Miller kept the sarcasm out of his voice.

Sarif waved a hand. The anger had vanished, either gone or truly well-hidden. "In today's day-and-age? Who does? Government doesn't mean what it used to and everybody knows it. Some people are desperate to turn back the clock. They're not gonna exonerate Adam if they find the control chip. They'll take him and use him themselves—if they weren't the ones behind it all along."

That made an unfortunate amount of sense.

  


  


In the end he defied every instinct he had and didn't take Sarif's list of names: anyone on that list wouldn't get the go-ahead from Menche, by default. He called Mac and got a list of his own within the half-hour. It would probably piss Menche off that he was now openly bringing in more of his own people to investigate, but he needed to do something.

Menche refused to hear him out. "We've got an expert coming from the Pent House, should be here in half an hour. I'm not pulling together a team to vet a bunch of unknowns."

"I'd be happy to lend you the manpower."

"This isn't the fucking corporate world, we don't do workshare here," she snapped. "Christ, you let Sarif get to you."

It wasn't Sarif that had gotten to him. It was this fucking country, this whole fucking continent. Menche had heard Miller out on the kidnapping angle and her team had still come back with the verdict that Cassan was dead. He didn't _think_ Menche was a mole. She could have just ordered Jensen shot, or left him in the chair, or kept EMPing him until his Sentinel was fried. But it hardly mattered. Her team was an active detriment to this investigation.

His own team was too far away to help with more than chasing ghosts through cyber-space.

His own team was under investigation, under sedation in an interrogation cell with all his limbs hacked off.

  


  


The expert from the Pent House was a brutish-looking woman who carried herself like a thug and held a master's degree from MIT. Two minutes of conversation was enough to understand how someone with her credentials had wound up working at a federal penitentiary: raging bigotry and a tendency to get into fist-fights with anyone who disagreed with her professional opinion. The former, not previously an asset, was now enough that she was picking up a second salary doing research for the US government, the details of which were blacked out. Her work performance reviews noted that she enjoyed her work immensely.

On that alone, Miller had disliked her before he'd even met her.

She'd brought her own diagnostic station with her, and hadn't needed any assistance in plugging the feeds into Jensen's chest and neck, moving with a callous briskness. It took her about thirty seconds of going through the data on her station's screen before she whistled through her teeth and declared, "Fuck me up the ass."

"You found something?" Menche asked sharply.

"Yeah. This fuck's file is a load of shit." She turned the screen so they could also see it. "He's got twice as many junctions as it says and all of them active. Let's see... a TITAN, shit. His Icarus is all fucked up, modded to hell. So's the Typhoon... fuck if I've ever seen whatever this is before... or this... wait, I think that's supposed to be the nanoblades?" She scrolled back upward. "Maybe. Hell. Even his limbs aren't to spec."

"Can you still install a suppression chip, if it's such a mess?"

"Oh, sure. I can do that right now, actually." She reached into a panel on her station and pulled out a device that looked looked far too similar to the solder gun for Miller's peace of mind. Before he could say anything, she'd already tipped Jensen's head forward with a rough hand and held it to the back of his neck. The pull of the trigger resulted in a distinctly metallic click, and when she pulled it away again, there was a small, bloody line about half an inch long, right over Jensen's spine.

She pulled a cartridge from the handle of the 'gun' and handed it to Menche, who took it but eyed it dubiously while the gun went back in its case. Miller wondered if she ever bothered to disinfect it.

"It'll be online in three, two... now. Done. Suppression chips are like your EMP chair, dead simple and they affect everything. Only autonomic processes get through, he tries anything more and it'll fire his pain centers until he's floored." She tapped at a couple options on her screen. "It's hooked to that remote I just gave you, so you can dial it up if he tries to push the leash—button on the top dials up, lower button dials back. A deadman switch comes standard, so if the remote goes offline or out of transmission range, so does the aug. That doesn't mean it's perfect technology. The prisoners keep trying to come up with ways around it, no matter how many of them get shot. My advice, use the remote earlier rather than later."

"We're trying _not_ to kill him," Miller reminded them both.

" _If_ there's reason to." Menche looked too damn pleased with the remote, now. "Is there any evidence of any other kind of control chip?"

"Let me look. If it's something simple, I might not find it. Hell, you just saw, it's fucking easy to install suppression chips that shut off systems."

"We're looking for something more complicated, something that could actually control actions," said Miller, which earned him the stink-eye from Menche but only a snort from the expert.

"A puppet chip? Fuck, I can tell you right now he doesn't have something like that."

"We all know they exist, you don't need to cry state secrets," he said, impatient.

"Sweet-cheeks, the brain is fucking complicated. Making a puppet out of an aug is just as fucking complicated. It takes space to implement and it'd stand out like a fucking neon sign, even in this shit-heap."

"The LIMB chip went unnoticed."

"The LIMB fuckers were basically test-driving your standard suppression chip, only they set it to stimulate the vagus nerve instead of a pain center. It drove augs nuts until basic nature took over. Something to take over control, to be able to make an aug go after an objective like this one did, that's a lot harder." She sat back, arms crossed over her chest. "And there's nothing dense enough to be that in any of his neural systems. Fucker's guilty, case closed."

"It can't be system-wide?"

She gave him a smile that was trying for patient and wound up as a sneer. "It's still got to wind up at the brain eventually. Sorry, London. Your attack dog's rabid. Time to put him down."

"We'll leave that to the US or Canadian courts," said Menche. She put her hands on her hips. "And we'll give him to you. Can you take him back to the Pent House with you tonight?"

The expert shook her head, looking irritated. "Fuck no, I don't handle them with or without a remote. That's what the guards are for."

“Menche—”

"I'd really like to get rid of him. We're not equipped for long-term confinement."

"I guess you international types don't have something like the Terminal Violation Policy. Tell you what, my transport's rated to hold prisoners if there are guards to do it. Call the Warden and ask him to send out a couple guards on a civilian flight, we can take my transport back. It'll be quicker than getting a second transport out here." She stood and started yanking cables out of Jensen, packing up her station.

Miller leaned toward Menche and let his voice drop down to a hiss. “Juggernaut—”

“That was a wild fucking goose chase. If Juggernaut had anything to do with it they'd be all over the web by now bragging about it.”

“He said he was trying kill Janus, not that he was working with them.”

“He was _lying_ , Miller. For fuck's sake. If he was trying to bring down Janus he wouldn't have any reason not to talk.” She shot him a contemptuous look.

Miller remained standing there as she and the Pent House expert left, thoughts teetering back and forth on the edge of a decision.

  


 

He appealed to Manderly. It felt rote. He made his case, as he had that morning. He knew it wouldn't do any good.

He had to try. What else was there to do?

 _"Come on, Jim, you know I don't like to overrule my people in their own jurisdictions,"_ Manderly said with a chiding air.

Miller bit his tongue and didn't bring up the numerous times he'd done just that—starting with Jensen's transfer last year. Christ. There'd been a time when he hadn't wanted Jensen anywhere near Prague.

Instead he played his last card. "There's more to this than Menche's team are seeing, sir. At the very least, the question of Eliza Cassan is more complicated—she'd not dead."

That got him a long moment of silence.

_"Are you sure?"_

"I've talked to her."

_"Face to face?"_

"She called me from her safehouse. She had my phone number. Didn't have long to chat before the connection was interrupted."

Manderly sighed, a long, drawn-out exhalation. _"A hoax, then. There's been a few reported already. I'm a friend of the family, and I was there at her funeral. She's gone, I'm sad to say."_

"It couldn't have been a hoax, she knew—"

_"I know it's hard when it's one of your own people who goes bad. But Jensen was augged to hell and back—it was just a matter of time. I was hoping that by transferring him to Prague, I could keep the fallout to a minimum, or he'd be off to Golem or Rabi'ah before it became an issue."_

_What?_ "Sir, if he shouldn't have been brought on as an agent—"

_"There were other factors to consider. Look. I know you've probably not been getting any rest—take the night and try to get some, it'll seem clearer in the morning. If somebody contacts you and claims to be Eliza again, you can get some of your team to track them down. It'd be nice to arrest these people—they're sick. They're just looking to take advantage of a tragedy."_

"It wasn't a hoax, sir."

_"You'll feel differently when you've gotten some shut-eye, I'm sure. Enough, Jim. Leave this to Menche. That's my final word."_

He hung up.

 

 

A few minutes later, his phone buzzed with a notification from Farah. She was here to take him back to the hotel.

He hadn't called her, but he went anyway. To the elevator, up to the roof, into the VTOL and to his seat. He buckled in. It all felt scripted, as though somebody else was taking these actions. Certainly he had no control over the present.

She dropped him off and he made his way to his hotel room, pulled open the curtains and looked out over the city, like Sarif had—if not with so grand a view. Dark hadn't yet fallen and the sidewalks below were full of pedestrians, small as ants. Impossible to keep track of them all from up here.

Distance made the job impossible.

The memory of that night in London months ago came back to him. _I won't let you die,_ Adam had told him, and saved his life. His life, and then thousands of others, in the immediate aftermath and the months to come. The Orchid had made much of that night fuzzy in Miller's memory, but he still remembered Adam looking down at him, one hand on Miller's shoulder and worry clear in his for-once-visible eyes.

He remembered thinking he should have trusted Adam before that.

His own words to Sarif earlier in the day came back to him: _If one man could go that way, so could another..._ but not that man.

His reflection in the window looked tired. Miller glared at it. "I'm not fucking done yet."

  


  


For the first time, he left his hotel by the lobby instead of by the roof. At street level the city smelled of smog and trash, a miasma that had him longing for the overpowering stench of cigarette smoke that ruled the streets of Prague. He pulled up a map of the city on his phone, studied the streets around him, then set off. This might be an affluent part of town, but in a city this large affluence could live literally just upstairs to poverty. It took him one subway ride—figuring out the fare and the directions was yet another joy—and then he was walking into a run-down looking pharmacy, one of those that looked like it sold drugs of dubious legality and got raided every other month. He picked up some acetominophen for his ever-present headache and asked where he could buy a pre-paid phone.

Right there, as it turned out. He bought two and paid in cash: ancient, compact bricks that didn't even have touch-screens. He powered one off and stuck it deep in a pocket for later, and walked out to look for a quiet place he could have a conversation that wasn't under the eye of the interested pharmacist.

Chang first. See what he had to say, now that Miller was out from under the Americans' eyes. Then MacReady. What exactly either of them could _do_ , he still didn't know, but he was damned if he'd just give up in the limited amount of time he had left.

He was half a block from the pharmacy when the second phone rang in his hand. Astonished, he raised it to his ear.

 _"Hello, Director Miller,"_ said Eliza Cassan.

"How the hell did you get _this_ number? Are you spying on me?"

_"A woman in my position has to spy on everyone. I've been hoping you'd pick up an alternate phone for a while."_

"If you could catch that then so could somebody else. Damn it."

_"Don't worry. I have my IT assistants screening you. As far as the GPS tracker in your regular phone is concerned, you're having an extended smoke break on top of your hotel."_

"I don't smoke."

_"That's probably best for your health, but you might not want to mention it to anyone."_

The inanity of this turn of conversation made him roll his eyes. "So you're saying we're secure for now."

_"Yes, Director."_

"Good." He took a moment to order his thoughts. He hadn't expected to reach her so fast. "I need to get the full story of exactly what happened from you, but we don't have a lot of time right now. You said that Jensen had some kind of advanced control chip. I need you to tell me everything you know about it, as much detail as you can. If you have any files you can send me, that would be better."

_"It's not a chip. It's a very advanced virus that's embedded in the source-code of a number of his augmentations, including his HUD, InfoLink, and all of his critical life-support."_

"I was told that was impossible."

_"The control doesn't come directly from the virus. Rather, it uses the core systems to provide subtle punishment/reward to influence the infected person's attitudes toward the programmer's desires over time. The Infolink and HUD access allows it to direct the person's dreams and subconscious processing, during which the same punishment/reward system can be used to effect more advanced behavioural programming in the biological brain."_

Miller took a moment to digest that. "You're saying he wasn't being controlled by someone else. He was brainwashed."

His response seemed to take her aback. When she spoke again she sounded almost unsure. _"Brain-washing is mind-control."_

"I know that. I mean he wasn't being—piloted by remote control. How difficult would it be to recognize this code?"

_"Extremely. Adam is a dear friend. When he came to me with his suspicions, I had my people look very closely, and my people are very good. But we didn't figure it out until it was too late.”_

Too late and already activated... activated because he'd been getting too close to slipping his leash? “Do you know who did this to him?”

“ _I have suspicions. I don't have proof.”_

Miller would never convince Menche to order the Pent House expert to take another look without something stronger to go on than an anonymous tip. Not now. And, hell, if there were people at the Pent House involved in this shit, he'd need to do even better than that. "I need _something_. If your people discovered the virus themselves, then they must have a copy of this code, samples—hell, screenshots. I need you to send it to me."

_"What will you do with it?"_

"Get Jensen off the hook, to start with." He stopped and took a couple of steps off the sidewalk, until he could lean against the wall of the nearest building. "Then... Christ. Start trying to track down whoever did it."

_"It's the same people as were behind the project that lead to Aug Incident."_

"Darrow's dead."

_"Darrow hijacked that project for his own purposes. His signal turned the stimuli from the LIMB chip up so high it drove people insane. The chip was originally designed to provide influence over an augmented population in much the same way as this virus, using subtle stimuli for reward/punishment modifications. While Darrow was killed when Panchaea fell, the other major project backers were never caught."_

"How do you know this?"

_"I've been trying to slip their leash for a very long time."_

His breath caught. He huddled back against the wall. Nobody paid any attention to him: like the denizens of any big city, they had better things to do, and the people in this one walked so fast that he was in no danger of being overheard. But the sense of being watched pressed down on him. He hoped it was just Cassan's people. "If you're prepared to turn evidence..."

_"The strongest evidence I had still wouldn't point to them directly, and it was destroyed in the attack three days ago."_

"Your testimony alone would be worth its weight in gold."

_"Nothing I have to say would stand up in court."_

"It would still give us somewhere to start. We can put you in witness protection in the meantime."

_"These people are powerful. They have a very long reach. You can't protect me from your own superiors, Director Miller."_

He grit his teeth. He knew things were not on the up-and-up in the Taskforce. He'd expected as much going in: it was a secret paramilitary force, it would have some dark corners. His job wasn't part of those dark corners and he would keep his people as far away from them as possible. The work that they were doing was good work. They went up against drug-runners, weapons smugglers, slavers, real pieces of shit.

"Are you accusing someone in particular?"

_"Manderly signed off on Adam's transfer to Prague. But he doesn't have any reason to want him there anymore."_

Manderly, who was was backing Menche.

Manderly, who said that Cassan still being alive was a fucking hoax.

He couldn't bypass Manderly. Not without evidence, and he'd have to be both careful and thorough putting it together. It would take time. Christ, an investigation of this scale—even with a team he could fully trust, it would take months, maybe years.

Adam had hours.

 _"A classified flight plan has been filed for an Interpol Taskforce Transport between New York and the Pent House,"_ said Cassan. _"The guards will be here at approximately 5AM tomorrow."_

He checked his phone. It was just past 8 in the evening. Under nine hours.

She'd tipped her hand. "You have a plan, I take it."

_"My people think we can get Adam out, and reverse what's been done to him. But we need your help."_

Of course they did. Because when it came to treason, you always needed an inside man.

He let it settle in his gut. Cassan could easily be lying. Her story was farfetched, it contradicted expert opinion... and even if it was true, she had admitted to being a part of this conspiracy. This could all just be another layer of it. Selective truths were the most effective kinds of lies.

He shoved off from the wall and started walking again, keeping the phone to his ear but not expecting her to say anything. He just wanted the movement. No other pedestrian paid any attention to him, all focused on their own cares, their own problems. A flash of metal that might have been a hand two years ago was revealed to be a buckle on a purse. A beggar next to a lamppost was missing his lower legs. He didn't have augs. If he had, he'd have been rounded up by the police: augs weren't allowed to panhandle in America. A public health and safety policy that had been passed last year.

If Adam was sent to the Pent House, by negligence or sabotage he would be killed, executed without trial. Unless, as Sarif said, something even worse happened to him. Menche knew that. Manderly knew that. And neither of them gave a damn.

Perhaps Miller couldn't trust Cassan, but he certainly couldn't trust the Taskforce.

"What did you have in mind?"

  


  


What Cassan had in mind was Miller's passcard and codes. _"It won't lead back to you. Once my people are in the system, they'll be able to lay enough trails to confuse the issue of how exactly they got in."_

"Great. I can live to commit treason another day."

_"The Taskforce needs all the good people it can hang onto, Director Miller. I don't want to see it left in the hands of people like Menche. Do you?"_

No. No, he didn't. And there was a not-insignificant part of him curling up in relief that he might not have to make this decision, that he might get to continue making vid-calls to his kids and visiting them on holidays.

"You think you'll be able to get to Jensen that easily? The layout is designed to be confusing."

_"We've been studying plans, and one of my people thinks she can do it. I hope you understand if I don't give you details."_

"Where did you get _plans_?"

_"The Taskforce's security on its communications and surveillance systems is much weaker than on its physical accesses. I've been keeping a close eye on Adam."_

So she'd seen what had happened to him. No wonder she wanted him out.

"I want your promise that you won't kill anyone."

_"Granted. We're planning on getting in and out without anyone the wiser."_

"You know about the Pent House's chip?"

_"Yes. That model is easily disabled."_

"Alright," Miller said hollowly. He stepped out from a pedestrian underpass and found another wall to park himself beside, so that he could be sure no one was lingering in earshot. And then he gave her his codes.

How easy it was to commit treason: just a couple of words. Not that it was too late to back out yet, after all. He could classify this all as an operation, write up a secret report, and in the end deliver Cassan and her co-conspirators into Menche's hands.

Oh, hell, he thought, pull yourself together. Jensen was the one who was supposed to be dark and brooding. Miller was trying to rescue him, not fill in for him. "What about the passcard? I can't just claim I lost it."

_"Take the subway back to your hotel. I'll tell my person to meet you at the station."_

 

Cassan's contact picked him out of the crowd almost immediately. As the rush of pedestrians getting off the train eased, Miller felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see a woman with a cranial aug prominently displayed, the thin silver line running through her parted hair to a node on her forehead. At a glance, it looked like a CASIE. Dammit, he hated those. It was one good thing about conducting treason over the phone, at least he knew he hadn't made his decision in a hormone-induced haze.

"Got a light, Director? EC said you might."

"Use a CASIE on me and I walk," he warned her perfunctorily.

"Jeez, relax." She looked offended as she tipped her head toward a side stairwell. "Do you get all pissy at Adam about his? Mind the cameras."

They walked in the shadow of the security cameras' arc, up the steps and into the twilight smog. He handed over the passcard, and she pulled a wallet-sized device from her coat pocket and inserted the card into it.

"For your information, yes, I do." Admittedly, it had taken him an embarrassingly long time to realize when Jensen was using the damn thing on him, but when he had, he'd threatened to haul him up on regulations if he ever caught him at it again. What regulations, Miller still wasn't quite sure, but when Jensen had apologized he'd had the eye-shields retracted in a show of genuine sincerity.

A light on the device flicked to green, and Cassan's agent popped the card out and handed it back to Miller. "Done. You should find a nice, visible place to hang out for a while. Hopefully, I'll never see you again."

"Good luck," he told her, and pocketed the device.

 

With Cassan's crew about to inflict massive damage on the Taskforce's surveillance, the best place to be for an alibi was either out of the city or back at the base where he could be seen in-person. Since he didn't have a good reason to leave the city, he went with the latter. He got back to the hotel and stayed an hour longer, then phoned Farah to fly him in, whereupon he phoned Manderly again and proceeded to get into a second round of arguments that was nothing more than restating everything he'd said the last time, in slightly different phrasing, to no better results. When Manderly finally ordered him to drop the issue and hung up, he glowered at the ceiling and then went to pick a fight with Menche.

Perhaps having sensed that she was next on his list, however, she'd gone home. He called her and they had a loud but short argument that ended when she swore at him and told him to fuck off until she was back in the office, which would be at 5am the next morning, and wasn't that goddamn early enough, Miller? When he pointed out that Jensen would have been shipped off by then, she demanded to know how he'd gotten the flight schedule, and he retorted that he was neither stupid nor deaf.

"Maybe you should consider why people think you're both," she snarled, and hung up on him.

He glowered at his phone and considered what else he could do to kill time: it was late enough now that, especially considering the lack of sleep he'd gotten in the last couple of days, staying here only made sense if he had something needing doing. None of the paperwork from Prague was urgent enough. MacReady was doing too damn good a job. Well, hell, if he got caught and put on secret trial for treason, at least his branch would be in good hands.

There was really only one thing left to do to kill the hours, and that was to try and get something further out of Jensen.

Since Jensen was still unconscious, that left Doctor May as his next target. Being technically inferior in rank within the Taskforce, she couldn't just hang up on him, which gave him plenty of time to grill her about Jensen's status before bringing the conversation around to the possibilities of waking him up within the next nine hours. She hemmed and hawwed and finally escaped by asking to put him on hold while she re-checked Jensen's monitors remotely, during which time she must have actually called Menche, who immediately called Miller and then they had an argument that rose near to screaming.

_"You're a fucking observer here, not the fucking branch director! Stop trying to fuck my people around before I cut your dick off with a rusty butcher's knife! You like augs so much, you can get one yourself!"_

The memory of Jensen's naked groin, and what wasn't there, made him wince long enough that he lost the argument quite thoroughly: for the best, since at least it meant she didn't go so far as to actually order him out of her base.

At half past one in the morning, without anything better left to do, he went to go stand watch in the viewing room. He didn't have a good reason to be there, but he supposed if asked he could say something about standing the deathwatch. It'd be true enough, if Cassan's people didn't come through, and with two agents on guard at all times, he'd have two witnesses to say he hadn't been a part of whatever was about to happen.

And if Cassan had lied to him and decided to get those potential witnesses out of the way through lethal force, then he'd be there, as well.

He stood with his arms crossed and tried not to think about calling his kids. He'd missed calling earlier, wrapped up in dealing with the immediate problem. He was too damn short-sighted to be a parent. Christ, he was an idiot.

In the interrogation room, Jensen's chest continued to rise and fall, with perfectly even, mechanical precision.

 

2AM. Cassan's people were pushing it. Miller pulled out his phone and looked up visitation protocols for the Pent House on the Taskforce server. He checked the list of registered aug experts in the US, although he'd practically memorized it now. It was too damn short for anyone's good. He gave way to weariness and took a seat behind the monitors. His head pounded.

The door opened, and there was a brief, static sound. Miller turned in time to see the bodies hit the floor as Cassan's woman rippled into visibility.

"You thought _this_ was the best place for an alibi?" she hissed, incredulous, as he got up to check pulses. Thready, but strong. One of the agents had bumped her head on the way down and gotten a cut, though he couldn't feel anything broken at her skull or neck. He moved them into recovery positions as Cassan's agent pulled a cart into the room and palmed the door shut.

The cart was the two-tier kind that IT used to move their equipment around on, and it had two monitors on the top and a computer box on the bottom, along with a large back dufflebag. The woman herself looked different, too. Her hair had been unbraided and straightened, falling down to hide the line of the CASIE aug, and the skin on her face was smoothed over with enough cake makeup to make her look extremely insecure—and to hide the rest of the CASIE. She wore business casual, and there was an ID card handing from her belt.

It wasn't just the cake makeup that was making her look insecure, Miller decided. She stood like she was poised to bolt at any second, and even that makeup couldn't hide the nervous tension on her face. Whatever their skills at costumes, Cassan's people—if she even had any other people besides this woman—were not trained at extractions.

"Are you it?" he asked her, trying to hide his own nervousness. Christ. He'd expected somebody more experienced. And she was going to have trouble moving Jensen around, unless she had strength augs along with the CASIE and glass cloak.

She glared at him. "I'm going to have to stun you, too, you realize that?"

"I've gotten stunned before, I don't have a medical condition that'll kill me," he informed her. "Do you want help loading him before you do that? Into the bag, right?"

She bit her lip, then nodded.

He checked the door as he passed, but unfortunately the viewing room wasn't meant to be locked from the inside. Damn. They'd just have to work quickly. They went into the interrogation room, and he started working at unstrapping Jensen and unhooking the various medical equipment, taking care to wipe away fingerprints immediately with his shirtsleeves. The woman stared at the stumps of Jensen's shoulders with disgust. "Christ," she muttered. "A fucking saw."

"Get moving," he told her.

She stayed him when he moved to disconnect the IV line, pulling a large syringe from a pocket. "Leave that in a moment. Better than me trying to find the vein myself." His hand closed on her wrist before she could stick the needle into the IV port.

"What's that?"

"It disables the suppression chip and it'll keep him knocked out. Don't want him waking up in the bag and blowing our cover on the way out."

"He doesn't have much bodymass—"

"Yeah, I know. _W_ _e_ actually found an aug doctor who could tell us exactly how much to use for a quadruple amputee with a Sentinel Health Enhancement."

He wondered if that meant David Sarif. Best not to ask. He let go of her hand, and she slid the needle into the port. It didn't take long: after thirty seconds, Adam was still unconscious, but when Miller looked up from undoing the last of the monitoring equipment, he saw that lines of pain had eased in Adam's face.

"Okay," said the woman, grabbing the duffle. "Help me stick him in here."

It was awkward. Jensen's shoulders were still too damn wide. There were two towels in the duffle, which they wrapped around his augs to muffle any sound, but they made it more bulky. At last they got it zipped shut and loaded onto the dolly, where it looked squat but not, Miller desperately hoped, too out of place.

"Let me sit down in the viewing room again before you shoot me," said Miller. "It'll be damn suspicious if I'm found in here. And for God's sake remember to put me in the recovery position, I refuse to fucking choke to death on my own goddamn spit."

"Sure, man," she said, still sounding tense, but also faintly bemused. Definitely not a field operative.

Which was how it was that Miller was sitting in the chair, wheeled around to face her and her taser, when the door opened and revealed a Taskforce agent, who shouted, "PATRICKS! Stop ignoring your—what the fuck!"

The agent reacted immediately, lunging forward. Cassan's agent reacted as well, but it was the wrong reaction: instead of tazing him she started to go invisible, trying to hide instead of attacking. The Taskforce agent—definitely a field agent, although at least he wasn't currently wearing combat gear—slammed his mass into hers, and they hit the wall with a loud thud. The wheeled cart was sent crashing toward the door into the interrogation room, where it hit and was slammed to a stop.

Miller launched himself out of the chair. The woman flickered visible again with a dazed expression on her face. She tried to knee her attacker in the groin but failed as the man slammed her against the wall again, knocking her head a second time, and got her arm in a grab that twisted the taser from her hand. Then Miller reached them and punched him in the side of the jaw. He staggered, Miller punched him twice more, and Cassan's woman retrieved her taser. Miller saw it coming just in time to disengage, and the man went down with a spark of electricity.

In the silence that followed, she was the one who remembered to close the door again.

Miller staggered, then got down on his knees and rolled the guy into recovery position. He caught sight of his hand as he did so and winced: his knuckles were bloody, one actively bleeding. He'd probably caught it on the guy's teeth. Shit.

"I have to go," said Cassan's woman, backing up to check on the cart. She looked like she wanted to throw up.

"Yeah," said Miller. He stood and stared down at the agent.

"You... uh. Thanks. You know you just blew cover, right?"

"Yeah."

"Unless you're gonna kill him."

"No."

"You sure?"

He looked up and glared at her. "Yes, I'm goddamn sure."

She put her hands up. "Okay, man. It's your life."

The cart hadn't tipped over when it had crashed into the door. She got it rolling again, opened the door, and went out. Miller hunted around for a tissue to wipe his hand off, and stalked out in her wake. The surveillance systems were down. He followed as she got into the elevator and pressed the button for the top level.

"I can't take you with me," she said.

"I didn't fucking ask, did I?" He pushed the button for the ground floor. They went up. His stop came first, and he left her alone, and walked out the front door of a Taskforce base for the last time as a free man. He stood outside the darkened shopfront that this branch used as a cover, and stuck his hands in his pockets.

He had his phone. He had the two burner phones. He had his wallet, low on cash. He had his sidearm, affixed with a GPS tracker. He had a GPL stuck in his arm.

His official phone and the gun went into the first trashcan he found, after he'd googled the nearest ATMs. He went to one and withdrew the maximum amount of cash that he could, a paltry two thousand USD. His cards—all chipped, all traceable—he dropped into the trash slot on the ATM. He stuck the passcard in there as well.

He found a corner that didn't make him feel like he was about to be mugged and leaned back against brickwork, watching the occasional car and pedestrian go by. With his first burner phone, he dialled the house. Neil and Susie and Ethan's house, not his. Not anymore, and now suddenly that had become 'never again'. Thirteen hours ahead meant that they'd all be out right now, the kids at school and Neil at work. Better this way: a simple recording, the last contact he'd be able to have for... God. Who knew. But at least he wouldn't have to try to—

_"Hello?"_

His heart froze in his chest.

"Susie? Why aren't you at school? Are you okay?"

_"DAD! Dad, you called!"_

"Susie, school—"

 _"It's SATURDAY, Dad,"_ and God, he could see her rolling her eyes. She yelled, not directly into the speaker, _"DAD'S ON THE PHONE! I TOLD YOU HE'D CALL!"_ And then, still excited, _"Did you catch lots of bad guys?"_

"I—"

No, he hadn't.

Everything had gone so fucking wrong.

"Sweetheart," he said, trying to keep his voice from wobbling, "Are your brother and dad there?"

 _"Yeah, yeah, they're—"_ and then he heard pounding in the background, running feet, and suddenly everything was very staticky as somebody on the other end turned it onto speakerphone, before the connection settled again and Ethan was there in his high-pitched voice, shouting, _"DAD, DAD!"_ and Neil's voice, chiding, _"Indoor voice, Ethan! Even when it's your dad calling._ Finally _, Jim."_

"I'm sorry I've been missing calls," he tried to say, and was promptly interrupted:

 _"Can we get video? I want video,"_ and, _"Shut up, Ethan, I get to talk to him first,"_ and, _"Don't talk to your brother that way, Susie."_

"Kids, please. I've got to make this quick. I just—I wanted to call and say I love you."

 _"Mushyyyy,"_ whined Susie, but Ethan piped, _"I love you too, Dad. Can we video now? Are you still fighting bad guys?"_

"I love you so much. And—kind of, yeah."

_"Jim, are you okay?"_

His voice caught in his throat. Their voices all spoke over one another, mingling together into a perfect chorus that he'd never get again. He listened, for one brief, perfect moment, and then he knew that if he didn't hang up now he would probably go back and turn himself in for the chance to cut a plea deal including visitation privileges.

And he could never, ever risk Susie coming to the States.

"I love you both. I gotta go. Take care of your dad, okay?"

He hung up. The phone burned in his hand. It was a cheap burner phone and had no kind of security on it. They could call him back any moment.

He popped the battery out and threw both it and the phone in the next trashcan he passed.

One burner phone. Twenty-two hundred in cash. A GPL chip in his arm. No local allies, no local resources. He ran through the list of people he might be able to phone. All were overseas. He should get rid of the GPL chip first, before Cassan's people stopped blocking the Taskforce's surveillance systems and he became a walking, broadcasting target. And then... then...

He was never going to see his kids again.

Stop thinking about it, he told himself, but he couldn't. How many phonecalls had he missed—how many times had he let work get in the way, had he stayed late, had he apologized without actually changing anything—

A car slowed and pulled alongside him, breaking him from his thoughts. He abruptly wished he'd waited a bit longer to throw away the gun, and then the driver's window rolled down and a man—Caucasian, greying blond, stubbled beard—leaned his head out. "Hey, mate," he said, in an accent nasal enough to twang. "Dear 'Liza thought you could use a pick-up."

Miller stared at the man, the car, back down the street from which he'd come, and then at the man again.

"What the hell," he said tiredly, and walked around to the other side to get in.

 

 

Miller woke up in a dark place. His brain felt like it had been wrapped in cotton wool. Carefully, he blinked and turned over, and saw that although the room he was in was darkened, there was an open door leading to a lighted hallway. He sat up, scrubbed his face, and realized that he'd been lying on a couch, and somebody had draped his coat over him.

What had happened? The driver had pulled over after five minutes and grabbed a bag from the back of the car, which held a blocky box he'd explained could remove the GPL implant. Miller had offered up his arm, there'd been pain and a frankly alarming amount of blood, and then...

He looked down at his arm, just now noticing that his sleeve was cut away and his forearm was swathed in bandages. Fuck, had it nicked an artery or something? He hoped he hadn't simply fainted. That would be too goddamn embarrassing. The other option, of course, was that the guy had drugged him, in which case the open door might be a carefully crafted lie.

Well, he wasn't going to find out by sitting here in the dark.

He got up, staggered, and then his head cleared enough to leave him steady on his feet and able to pull on his coat. Walking to the hallway, he squinted. The plain walls and tiled flooring were showing their age, spotted here and there, occasionally missing plaster. He heard voices coming from further down the hall, but there were nearer doors. When he stuck his head through the nearest doorway and found a light switch, it didn't turn on, and the light of the hall didn't reveal anything inside.

He could stumble around here all day or he could just go meet the people who'd asked him to commit treason and then rescued him from the fallout.

Before he could decide, the driver who'd picked him up appeared in the doorway at the end of the hall, and headed toward him at a brisk pace. "Ah, good, you're up," he said, still with that nasal accent. "Sorry about that, mate. Your GPL wasn't in the best spot for getting ripped up, and we had to do some fast work and a little bit of surgery to repair the damage, but you should be fine—no augments, even." His mouth crooked in a smile, as if he'd recognized immediately where Miller's brain had gone at the mention of repairing damage.

Miller tugged at his jacket sleeve. "Thanks, I guess."

"Nah, man, you helped get Jensen out alive." The smile faded from the guy's face. "Wasn't right to leave you in the lurch after that."

Miller tipped his head in acknowledgement and found he didn't have anything else to say. The fuzziness was starting to clear away, but in its wake it left a great gaping emptiness in his chest. It was hard to care about small details such as... well, anything.

It probably showed on his face. The driver stepped closer, a bit carefully, and then into arms' reach, and clapped Miller on the shoulder, guiding him down the hall to where he'd come from. "Come have some coffee. M'name's Gavin. I'm holding down the fort while everybody else fusses over Jensen."

The next room down turned out to be some kind of waiting room-turned-kitchen. Behind what had once been a reception desk, somebody had set up a microwave and two portable elements, along with a coffee maker. A large round table in the middle of the room was newer than most of the other decor, and there were three open laptops on it, along with a scattering of computer parts, screwdrivers, and coffee mugs. A jacket had been tossed over the back of one chair.

Gavin went around and filled up a new mug, then came back and handed it to Miller. He sniffed and found himself making a face, but it was hardly any worse than the shit they got at the Taskforce.

He shoved that thought away.

"What is this place?" he asked instead. "Old LIMB clinic?"

"Yeah. This whole complex got zoned for abandonment months back. Looters missed certain important equipment, and other stuff we could just move back in."

"For Jensen," Miller realized.

"Got it in one." Gavin's face darkened, and Miller waited for the recriminations, but instead he said, "That fucking virus, man. Fucking scary thing."

"Yeah."

Gavin walked over to the table and fetched his own coffee from among the many abandoned there. When he looked up, it was considering. "Let's talk about you, man. You know what you're gonna do?"

Miller shook his head. The Taskforce would be hunting him. His own people... he thought, fleetingly, of what Cassan had said, about Manderly and the people who had set up the Aug Incident. Three days ago, he'd have launched an investigation. Now, it was as remote and abstract a problem as global warming: a looming global threat which he could do absolutely nothing about.

"We covered the electronic tracks, but, uh... well, the guy you punched out, he woke up and started singing," said Gavin. "You'll want to keep low, whatever you do. You can stay here, we'll be here for a couple days at least. Make up your mind what you want to do next."

A door leading to another interior hallway was wrenched open from the other side, and Miller jumped, hand going for a sidearm that he no longer had. Gavin, on the other hand, came up with a machine pistol, and Miller stared: where the fuck had he been hiding that? It vanished just as quickly beneath the table as none other than David Sarif stormed into the room, eyebrows drawn together in a thunderous scowl that evaporated when he saw Miller.

"Jim! Thank god, you're up. Come on, I need you to come tell Eliza she's being ridiculous." He turned and headed back the way he'd come.

Miller threw a baffled look at Gavin, but the man was looking inscrutable. After a moment, Gavin shrugged. "Go on, man. I gotta stay here, keep an eye on the entrance."

An eye and a Hurricane TMP-18. Right.

He followed Sarif down the corridor and found himself in the middle of an operating theatre: specifically, a LIMB operating theatre. Jensen was lying on the table, covered up to the neck with a sheet, the theatre arms poised, spider-like, above him. Nearby was a table with gleaming parts laid out: arms and legs, yes, but also something that looked like a heart, and a dozen other pieces besides. It looked like too much metal to fit into a single man.

There were three other people in the theatre, two sitting at computers: a Caucasian man with a ratty pony-tail, a Filipino woman with an eye-smartingly bright red jacket, and the woman who'd come in to rescue Jensen, now missing the cake makeup and dressed in the same clothes she'd been wearing when she'd copied Miller's passcard. None of them were expecting to see him: the last swore and asked, "Sarif, are you out of your fucking mind?"

On the wall was a screen from which Cassan was watching. She looked as put-together as always, and her voice was calm as she said, _"Hello, Jim."_

"He could be a plant, or, hell, he could change his mind and turn us all in for a plea—"

"As much as it pains me, I have to agree. He's not—"

Sarif waved their objections away. "He's facing a treason trial, I think that's a pretty firm statement of commitment."

_"Adam cleared him."_

"That just means he's not an Illuminatus, Adam didn't say we should trust him!"

That, obscurely, hurt. He'd just thrown away—everything, for Adam.

Because it was the right thing to do, he reminded himself.

"He's standing right here," said Sarif. "Jim: are you going to inform the authorities about anyone here?"

A couple hours ago he'd been the authorities. "No," said Miller.

"There you go, he's telling the truth," said Sarif.

"Oh, please," said Adam's rescuer. "CASIE's not fool-proof—"

 _"But combined with what we already know of him, it makes a powerful argument,"_ said Eliza. _"Please, Alex. I think we should trust him."_

"To a point, maybe," muttered the pony-tail man.

"Adam respects him, at least. So if we're going to do this by vote then he should get to join in. Jim, these people want to wait on replacing Adam's augs—"

"Don't include me in this," the red-jacket woman muttered, not looking up from her computer. "I am not a part of this argument, I am having nothing to do with this."

Sarif ignored her. "Waiting endangers us. Adam's got remote hacking augs and he could seriously fuck up our setup here if the brainwashing tells him to—which it probably will."

"He didn't say anything while Interpol was trying to interrogate him," said Pony-tail.

Sarif ignored him too. "Second, we've got a good setup here and we should take advantage of it while it lasts. This is going to be really complex surgery and we need all the time we can get for it."

_"It wouldn't be good for Adam's mental health."_

"What, and sitting around with a bunch of foreign augs is?" Sarif turned to Miller. "None of his augs right now are his original Sarif Industries augs. They're all mimics with that fucking virus in their basecode. And if there's something else to that virus, something that allows any kind of remote control, then we need to shut that down before the Illuminati get any bright ideas about using it."

"They couldn't get past my security," Red-jacket said indignantly.

"We need to use all the time we have," Sarif insisted.

Pony-tail shook his head and leaned back in his chair. He had the kind of bags under his eyes that came from pulling the kind of hours that Miller had been, recently. "Boss, I hate to say this, but if you don't ask him he won't forgive you a second time."

Sarif rounded on him. "And if he says no? He's brainwashed, Frank."

"Oh, thanks so much for the name reveal!"

Frank... ah. Francis Pritchard, David Sarif's former head of Sarif Industries' cyber-security division, Chang's not-so-dead man. Well, at least Miller could trust his competence, if he'd been the one keeping Chang out of Sarif's networks. He came out of his musings to realize that everyone was looking at him.

"What?"

Sarif looked expectant. "So? You've been closest to him recently. Wait for him to wake up and ask, or fix the problem before it has a chance to be a problem? Not to mention letting him wake up with limbs again, since they were removed with a fucking powersaw."

Miller stared at him. Then he pointed at the red-jacket woman. "I'm with her. I'm not part of this. This isn't my decision to make." He paused, and then pointed at Eliza's screen. "But if it has to be then I'm with her, because you have a fucking problem, Sarif."

Sarif threw up a hand in disgust, and Miller turned and walked out.

 

He was on his second cup of terrible coffee before anyone else tried to drag him into conversation. The first cup had gone cold before he'd managed to finish half of it, and he'd thrown it out. Gavin hadn't commented, had been, in fact, entirely absorbed with whatever he was doing on his laptop.

Miller thought about asking to borrow a laptop, or a phone, or—anything. But it felt like too much effort, when he had nobody he could risk calling.

It was Pritchard who came out of the room first. "Jensen's awake," he said, sounding deeply uncomfortable. "He wants to speak with you." Without waiting for a reply, he vanished down the corridor with the room that Miller had woken up in.

When he ventured back into the operating theatre, it was to find a short, heavily augged man—kid, really—in scrubs tapping away at a laptop in the corner, who jumped up in alarm when Miller entered. "Shit! Interpol guy!"

"Not so much," said Miller.

"Ah. Oh, yeah."

There wasn't anyone else left in the room. The other door out of the theatre was closed, but it must lead to a back exit instead of just a storage closet, for all that Gavin talked about keeping an eye on the entrance. They had to trust the new guy, though, if they'd left him alone, without even Cassan keeping an eye on him from the screen. From the scrubs, he probably a doctor, which meant they had to really trust him.

"Director?"

He looked over and saw that Jensen was, improbably, attempting to sit up: difficult, without any arms or legs. It elicited immediate scolding from the man in scrubs. "Stop trying to do that! We know you're tough, stop trying to move and throw off my sensors here."

"Better do as the doc says," Miller said, and came over to stand next to Jensen.

His eyeshields were retracted and he looked at Miller with focused awareness. It reminded Miller painfully of the last time he'd seen Jensen before this whole clusterfuck began, when he'd requested some personal time. He'd brought two beers and Miller had accused him of bribery, but had taken twenty minutes to sit around and shoot the shit with him anyway.

They'd both been stressed but cheerful, then. Now there was something else lurking in Adam's eyes. In another man, Miller would have named it panic. But Adam wasn't struggling anymore. He had it under control.

Almost. His voice held the faintest note of it as he said, "Sorry, Jim. I didn't... I never meant for you to get dragged into this."

"It wasn't your choice."

"Kind of was." His mouth curled in a snarl. "They wanted Juggernaut. I walked right into it. They wound me up and let me go, because they knew I'd have to find—I'd kill her, I killed her—"

"Adam!" snapped the doctor. He came around to Adam's other side and put a hand on Adam's shoulder, grounding him to the table. "Calm down, man, you're doing it again. Look at me! Keep your brain in the present."

"Sorry," said Adam. He sounded dazed. "I keep—I have to tell someone it's done."

"You've told me," said Miller. "It's fine."

"No. Jim, they told me you left. The Taskforce needs people like you."

"The Taskforce will survive without me."

"This isn't what I wanted to happen."

"Calm down or I am going to have to sedate you," said the doctor.

Adam took a shuddering breath.

"I don't blame you," Miller told him. "I do want some fucking answers, eventually. It can wait."

"And probably should," said the doctor, glancing back at his laptop. "This thing's almost loaded. Adam, you gonna tell him or do I?"

"Tell me what?"

"I will," said Adam. He sighed. "They worked up a way to counter the... brainwashing, but it'll take time. I can't—I can't wait that long. I'd rather—"

"Adam," warned the doctor.

"Fine. Fine. Koller here's putting in suppression coding. It'll be more robust than the Pent House stuff."

"More robust and also with an off switch," said Koller. "I'm not loading you up to walk around in agony all day, my stuff is sweet and unobtrusive. It only turns on when it's told to turn on."

"I want you to have the switch," said Adam.

Miller flinched. "Adam..."

"Sir. Jim. Please. I can't trust Sarif with it, he's... it's complicated. The others won't. I can't—I can't ask—" his breathing quickened again in distress.

Miller looked up at the doctor, who was pressing down on Adam's shoulder again. Their eyes met. _Say yes,_ Koller mouthed, but Miller was remembering the remote in Menche's hands, how pleased she'd looked with it. And that fucking Pent House tech's advice: use it sooner rather than later.

"I killed twenty-five people," Adam said hoarsely. "Innocents. I can't do that again. Please."

Miller looked back down at him, and that was a mistake. Adam's sincerity was all in his eyes. It was probably why he came off like such a bastard most of the time, with the shades down. Damnit. And what would he do, shadow Adam for as long as it took the brainwashing to reverse? Hell.

"Alright," said Miller.

"Brilliant!" said Koller, very chirpily. "Great. Okay. I will get you all hooked up with it. Adam, we should really get started now."

Adam's reply came out on a sigh. "Yeah. Do it. Jim—thank you."

"It's fine."

"It's great!" said Koller. "And you need to go away or scrub up now."

"You'll be fine," said Miller, and rested a hand on Adam's shoulder, close enough to the neck that it was skin against skin, something Adam could actually feel.

Adam looked back at him, eyes pained and pleading. "Jim," he said, the name slurred in his mouth. Panic became confusion, and then bloomed into terror. He started to struggle, his stumps moving in vain, and Koller dropped an emptied syringe into the surgical tray and moved to assist as Miller tried to steady him. It wasn't difficult. Already whatever sedative Koller had used was slowing him.

"You'll be alright," said Miller, as Adam's eyelids fluttered closed. He waited a cautious moment.

Koller let go, took a breath, and then made a shooing motion. "Look... unless you do wanna be here, you should go. This is gonna take a while, we're doing it in shifts. And it's gonna be messy, most people don't like that—"

Miller cut him off with a sharp look. "He was panicking. That the sedative?"

"No, that's—" Koller made an encompassing gesture. "And anyway he hates being put out. I mean, shit, look what's happened when—" He cut himself off, looking embarrassed. "Anyway. Unless you're planning to stick around and guard him or something I really don't think he'd appreciate an audience."

No. Probably not. And guarding him... ha. Miller was no aug expert; he had no way to tell if Koller was going to slip in something dangerous. Adam had already insisted on something dangerous.

Miller left.

 

He was on his third cup of coffee before he decided to bite the bullet. It might have just been so he'd have an excuse to stop drinking the coffee, which really was, truly, terrible.

"So," he said, and set the coffee down. "You're the Juggernaut Collective."


End file.
